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SDL has understood for a long time now the importance of automated translation and the future uses it will have in the business world. Limitations of automated translation are also understood. So 3 years ago, an innovative solution was put together. It combined the best of both worlds - humans and machines.

Automated translation yesterday
Modern automated translation began in the 1950s in a joint project between Georgetown University and IBM. A computer operator entered Russian text into an IBM mainframe computer. A little later, the printer started producing fully understandable English content. News traveled fast and soon, newspaper headlines were reading, "Computer Brain Translates Russian into English", producing great excitement at the invention.

Automated translation today
Today with computers being so much more powerful than those of 60 years ago, the use of automated translation has changed dramatically since then.

"Gisting"
There are different requirements for information in other languages. Sometimes friends are chatting via instant messaging tools and want to understand roughly what is being said. Equally, a foreign-language e-mail may need to be understood, or someone goes to a website to get a quick translation of certain information - freetranslation.com for example. For these purposes, automated translation can provide a "gist" of the meaning of the original language.

Some organizations are extending the use of "gisting", so that in cases such as some support or knowledge base information, customers can select to have a gist translation performed on the content, helping the user get an understanding of content which otherwise would not be in their own language. SDL offers a solution called the "Enterprise Translation Server" and this is used today to deliver the most popular free translation gisting service.

One of the things that may be going through your mind at this point is, "Yes fine, so that is nice that someone can get a rough idea of what is being said, but what if they want to be certain that the information they read is correct and relates to the product or service they have purchased or plan to purchase?" There is a solution.

High-quality automated (or machine) translation
SDL Knowledge-based Translation System (SDL KbTS) was born, combining translation memory (used by most translators across the world), automated (or machine) translation, terminology extraction and dictionaries, all combined together in one, tightly integrated solution with humans checking the source content and post-editing the output translation. The total solution provides high-quality, publishable content, used by organizations such as Best Western, CA, CNH, The Chrysler Group, HP, Microsoft and RS Components. Some of these companies have been using KbT since its outset 3 years ago and continue to be delighted at the quality output.

Service manuals that go with the different automobiles that leave Chysler factories are translated using SDL KbTS. The large volumes of content which would normally be slow and expensive to translate using traditional methods are passed through the system.

RS Components, one of the largest suppliers of electronic and electrical components, provides large volumes of product catalogue content to its global customers. Through using this combination of automated translation and human skills, it is now able to simultaneously ship products in different markets, achieve a 35% reduction in time-to-market and 27% cost savings over traditional methods.

Rob Fifield, Head of Media Production at RS Components , headquartered in the UK, says, "SDL Knowledge-based Translation System has provided us with a 25% improvement in productivity, as well as a reduction in costs of 27%. It meets our tight deadlines and provides us with high-quality multilingual content, which enables us to support our new business strategy."

The wonders of a solution such as this it that you can get the benefits of automated translation - accelerated time-to-market and lower cost translations, but combine it with other technologies and humans to make sure you do not sacrifice quality through gaining the above benefits. Additionally, the quality just goes up and up, since through the tight integration of the different technologies and humans, anything that needs improvement can get fed back into the system so that next time, it translates better. This can only be achieved by tight integration.
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