Artificial intelligence in technical translations

18 T A I W A N B u s i n e s s . E U l services l production l 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 highquality translation of technical documentation is possible using modern technologies. p How long have you been translating technical documentation and what exactly do you do? We celebrate our 33rd anniversary this year: our parent company STAR AG Switzerland was founded in 1984, we have been operating in the Czech and Slovak markets for 19 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 material is intended. We work with native speakers in the target country; the final product is special 2020 T + T Technika a trh 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'. p 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 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. p 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