Products/Services/Solutions
SDL KbTS sees a 300% increase in customers in 2 years!
SDL Knowledge-based Translation System™ is growing in the number of customers turning to this solution. In the last two years, SDL has seen a 300% increase in the number of customers using the system. Why is it so popular? Because our customers get the benefits of machine translation – up to 50% faster time-to-market and up to 40% lower cost, whilst still getting the high-quality they expect in order to protect their brand. Here is a bit of information about the history of automated translation, the different applications of it in the business world, and how SDL KbTS solves multilingual issues for companies today.
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 star¬ted producing fully understandable English content. News travelled fast and soon, newspaper headlines were reading, “Computer Brain Translates Russian into the King’s English”, producing great excitement at the invention.
Automated translation today
With today’s 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 solutions called the “Enterprise Translation Server” and this is used today to deliver the world’s most popular free translation gisting service – www.freetranslation.com.
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 has understood for a long time now the importance of automated translation and the future uses it will have in the business world. Automated translation’s limitations are also understood. So 3 years ago, an innovative solution was put together. It combined the best of both worlds - humans and machines.
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’s 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 don’t 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.
If you are thinking this may be valuable for you, consider some of these questions. If you can answer yes, then you could get in touch with us to discuss the options. Do you have high volumes of content to translate (eg 500,000 plus words)? Is the content fairly factual information – such as technical documentation, knowledge base or customer support content, catalogue information, non-marketing website pages, virus alerts? If so, we could have a discussion with you to look at more details and see whether you could benefit from this.
Find out more about SDL Knowledge-based Translation System through:
White Papers:
Communication to the 21st Century Consumer – this highlights the changes that have taken place in the last 25 years, with technology, trade and business around the world. It looks at the increasing requirements to put content into the language of the consumer and yet the challenges of dealing with such high volumes.
High-quality automated translation for global brands – this white paper looks at the different uses of automated translation today, including gisting and high-quality and details some of the customers and their different types of usage.
Case Studies:
For more information on SDL KbTS go to www.sdl.com/kbt
