myGengo is built on the premise that human translation is irreplaceable. It will always be necessary for the translation of content where both unnatural language and mistakes like this might cost you money. This may include product descriptions on your e-commerce site, your company’s blog, or simply emails to your overseas clients - all of which we are confident we provide a scalable and cost-effective human translation solution for. That said, we see the advancements with Google Translate and other machine translation services not as competition, but as a vital tool. There are countless everyday tasks that we use Google Translate for, and our lives have become easier as a result. Here are a few examples, and please be sure to share yours.
1. Multilingual Customer support
As a startup dealing with translators and customers around the world, we receive a lot of messages from our users in languages other than English. To help reduce our response time, we will first translate non-English tickets using Google translate to see if we can catch the general meaning of the ticket. We then send the support ticket off to the most relevant person who writes a response to the user in English. Then, our global team of *human translators* translates the response and sends it to the user. This hybrid approach really helps make the multilingual CRM process more efficient-- no matter their native language, all of our users get a helpful response fast.
2. Quality Check
We’ve got a great team of human translators, and using machine translation can actually help us keep it that way. During spot checking, one of the most basic tests our Quality Assurance team performs is to paste the original text into Google translate to make sure the translation submitted by our human translators isn’t exactly the same. We've got a great team, and It is very rare that we find machine translations submitted, but as this check only takes 5 seconds, our philosophy is it’s better to be safe than sorry. More techniques on checking the quality of your translation can be found at this previous post.
3. Social Media
The translation industry is inherently global, and as we reach out to translators and potential customers via groups and forums located on Facebook, Twitter (check out @mygengo or @mygengo_ja), Linked-in and more, we often will receive wall posts, tweets, etc. in foreign languages. Much like the technique we use with customer support, we will first machine translate messages sent via social media in foreign languages and then human translate our response.
4. Language Detection
When we first launched, we noticed that quite a few customers were making the mistake of ordering their translations in the wrong language pair. A customer wanting an En > Ja translation might select Ja > En which means their job would be shown to the wrong group of translators and take longer to be completed. To prevent this from happening, our new order form connects to the Google Translate API to detect the language of the text you input and auto-select it as your source language.
5. myGengo API
Our human translation API is designed to make it easy to order translations from within the most widely used content-creation platforms. With more and more plugins being created in our API Lab, we are getting closer to this goal. We understand though that many users will only need human translations for a portion of their content. Other users might want to load a machine translation onto their blog or e-commerce site while they wait for their *human* translation to be completed. To make this combined use of machine and human translation seamless, our API includes a machine translation option which again connects to the Google Translate API.
6. For Fun! Check out the Google Translate Beatbox
- Go to Google Translate
- Set the translator to translate German to German
- Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch
- Click “listen”
- Be amazed :)
