Artificial intelligence in technical translations

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