10

TAIWAN Business.EU l services l production support

Artificial Intelligence

in Technical Translations

We asked Mr László Jankovics, the representative

of the STAR Group, a translation and software agency

with 51 branches on 4 continents, if efficient

and high-quality translation of technical documentation

is possible using modern technologies.

How long have you been

translating technical documentation

and what exactly do you do?

We celebrate our 34th anniversary this year:

our parent company STAR AG Switzerland

was founded in 1984, we have been

operating in the Czech and Slovak markets

for 20 years. In short, we help our clients

communicate in foreign languages. We

offer our clients comprehensive services

that they need to communicate in a foreign

language, whether internal or with customers, in both the written and spoken

forms. We do localise the texts: We take

into account the customs and traditions

of the local cultural environment for which

the materia is intended. We work with

native speakers in the target country;

the final product is then a fully understandable, stylistically and technically correct

text. We mainly translate technical documentation, manuals, catalogues, service books,

localize software, but also provide other

services such as interpreting, audio recordings, audio-visual applications and software solutions. The translations are always

done by professionals familiar with the specific

sectors who understand the technical texts

they work on. There is nothing worse than

a translator, even with the best possible

language skills, who does not understand

the subject of translation – this creates

the 'translation howlers'.

What technical subjects do you

translate and how do you choose your

translators?

Automotive, mechanical engineering, automation, electronics, home appliances manual

tools, agricultural machinery, pharmacy, IT,

optics and many other sectors. Any technical, but also legal, economic, business, or

marketing text. Choosing the right translators

is a very demanding and time-consuming

task. We are actively looking for them at

different forums, institutions or universities,

and they also contact us themselves. Each

candidate goes through a detailed testing

process and we choose those who do well

in terms of factual and technical correctness

as well as in terms of stylistic and linguistic

correctness. The ratio of those who contact

special 2018

to us and those we choose speaks volumes: 60:1. We translate into about 50 languages, in the last few years increasingly

into Asian languages.

Do you use special translation

software?

Yes, for more than 20 years now, we have

been using our in-house developed software Transit NXT for Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) with fuzzy logic. For large

and long-term orders, "artificial intelligence,"

i.e. machine translation, comes in, however,

producing a completely different quality

than that produced by free translation

software. Transit does not replace the work

of a translator; it only makes his work more

efficient and more accurate. The software

remembers every translated sentence the

translator has ever written. When an identical sentence occurs in the future, it is automatically pre-translated (with the possibility