In-house interview!　Sports Association Report Translation Edition

In-house interview!　Sports Association Report Translation Edition

Before you read this blog, let me review the terminology.

What is Localization?

To make a product or service usable in another country,

To adapt a product or service to the local language of a country so that it can be used in other countries.

What is Memsource?

A cloud service in the genre of translation support tools called "MemSource".

It allows you to effectively utilize past translation assets and unify terminology.

What is HMT (Human & Machine Translation)?

　　　　KODENSHA's proprietary AI translation software and various language processing tools are combined with human translation and

　　　　This service combines Takadensha' s proprietary AI translation software and various language processing tools with human translation and post-editing to provide high quality translations at low cost and short turnaround time.

　　　　You can select " Kohdensha kode-AI " on Memsource.

~ (Start the interview immediately!) ~ (Start of interview!)

As the demand for machine translation continues to increase in localization,

How can we make the best use of machines and human hands?

Today's interview is titled "Sports Association Report Translation Edition.

Why post-editing?

Author: I heard that a sports association uses HMT to translate reports that they publish on a regular basis.

PM (A) (*Abbreviation for project manager (hereinafter referred to as "PM")):

Yes, this time it was an English to Japanese Japanese translation project.

We handled it by machine translation and then post-editing, in which the results were corrected by human hands.

The process was machine translation + full post-editing + double-checking of the results.

Author: When it comes to reports regularly published by sports associations, I think Japanese translations of past reports already existed,

Was there any particular reason why you decided to translate a new one?

PM (A): The main reason was that the Japanese translation previously done by another company was difficult to read and the client was not satisfied with the direct translation.

Author: So that's what you meant. Then, can you tell us why you decided to use HMT and how you came to provide the service?

Author: I think there is a difference between machine translation and human translation.

PM (A): Our client requested the lowest possible cost proposal for a project that was in competition with a competitor and that would affect the amount of work to be done in the future.

PM (A): Our client requested that we provide the lowest cost proposal possible for a project that was in competition with a competitor and that would determine the amount of work to be done.

After hearing about the required quality level, we proposed post-editing (machine translation + full post-editing + cross-checking).

We proposed post-editing (machine translation + full post-editing + cross-checking). Since there was not much time left before the desired delivery date, this proposal was accepted because it would shorten the delivery date and reduce costs compared to manual translation.

This proposal was adopted.

Author: By combining machine translation with human translation and checking, we were able to shorten the turnaround time.

What were some of the innovations you made in the process?

PM (A): We extracted sentences from the past bilingual data (completed monolingual English/Japanese versions) provided to us as reference material.

PM (A): A bilingual corpus was created by extracting sentences from the past bilingual data provided as reference materials (completed monolingual English/Japanese versions as word files) and aligning them sentence by sentence. Through this process,

This work enabled us to create a bilingual corpus that can be imported into Memsource as a TM (translation memory), which can be used for sentences that are identical or similar to previous source text data,

This allows us to translate sentences that are identical or similar to previous source data while referring to the corresponding previous translation data.

Author: The big advantage is that we can work by importing as TMs and referring to previous translation data for similar sentences!

PM (A): Unfortunately, we did not have time to prepare a TB (glossary) in advance and were unable to do so,

However, we were able to efficiently check the translation after completion of the work (to ensure that the translations of technical terms were consistent) by preparing a glossary as needed in parallel with the translation work.

This was also a very good thing.

Surprising Pitfalls

Author: On the other hand, please tell us about any problems or difficulties you faced while working.

PM (A): The quality of NMT (Neural Machine Translation) has improved and the translation results have become more stable.

PM (A): As the quality of NMT (Neural Machine Translation) has improved and the translation results have become more stable, there are many translations that "look" fine at first glance, but require the skill to correct them without overlooking omissions or misreadings of context that can easily occur with NMT.

In addition, there was a great deal of image data included in the document, and the process involved manually placing text boxes in the relevant sections,

So it also took a long time to do other tasks besides translation, didn't it?

Author: Our translators and checkers are highly skilled and have a reputation for quality.

I think we can say that our translators and checkers demonstrated their strengths to the fullest in this project.

PM (A): Yes. We also had an employee who enjoys the sport, who read the Japanese translation and checked whether the expressions were natural or not.

If there were any unnatural expressions, we would check them with the person in charge of English translation.

Author: Please tell us about the later stages of this project.

PM (A): After the delivery of the translation, we received an additional order for the creation of a bilingual corpus and glossary for future orders for the same project.

We expect that we will be able to further reduce costs and delivery time by effectively using the deliverables from this project as TMs and TBs for the next order.

We expect that we will be able to further reduce costs and shorten delivery time.

Tomorrow, we will bring you an interview about the use of Memsource! Enjoy the interview!