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