Category: Translate.

For translators without a technical background, dealing with HTML tags within source texts can be tricky. Knowing a few of the basics can help to eliminate mistakes almost entirely, so we thought we'd post a quick tutorial. I'll explain both the basics of translating a source text that has HTML tags as well as give a quick overview of the technical solutions we are working on to make dealing with HTML easier, and to prevent these mistakes from happening. What is HTML? For those new to HTML, HTML is a language used to describe a website to your web browser. It consists of a se... ›Read more

We’ve been highlighting some of the customers we’ve helped go global with our translation services. For part three of this mini-series, we’ll be focusing on Evernote, a incredibly portable note-taking application that works with and syncs to pretty much every platform imaginable.  Installing the program was easy: I just had to download, sign up and then I was ready to go. With its simple but well-executed concept and a plethora of apps built specifically to highlight this note-taking program's best features, it's no surprise that Evernote has been so successful.  So when the aw... ›Read more

You may have noticed myGengo's got a new look. With simplicity and ease of use in mind, we've just released a redesign that streamlines the user experience for both our customers and translators. Included are new features that make for quicker, more intuitive navigation. This means actions such as viewing your list of translation orders, managing your preferred translators list, or changing your account settings have gotten a lot simpler. Here are the highlights: New header design  We've moved the sidebar menu items to the top of the page and converted them to sub-navigation.... ›Read more

This is a guest post from friend of myGengo, Jon Yongfook Cockle, who has helped us craft our new order form with the aim of making it a conversion machine. These are simple tips that will likely help your site's conversions too, so please read on! I’m @yongfook and I’m on my way out of Japan after a 9-year adventure in all things e-commerce and internet. For my final month in Japan I decided to help out myGengo on a very specific challenge. The Challenge: Increase the Order Form Conversion Rate! When guiding a user through a process that ultimately results in them purchasing something, you need to treat them with extreme care. A brok... ›Read more

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 cou... ›Read more

As you will know if you are a translator for myGengo, we're going through an extremely high-traffic period. You may have experienced one or more of the following issues: The website is unavailable The website takes an extremely long time to load Your worker dashboard loads as a blank page While working on a translation, the site does not save your work correctly Your RSS feed does not load You cannot tell if a job was submitted correctly I appreciate any and all of these are very frustrating for translators. It's hard for you to rely on the service when... ›Read more

We recently completed an interesting project that reveals some of the progress we've been making with our translators; specifically with our Japanese > English translator pool. Since we love visualizing statistics and shared some statistics about content from an input perspective, let me shed some light on our output. After launching our translation API in April of 2010, one of the first major projects to come through was a 500,000+ character database of descriptions for cosmetics products. The customer was an established Japanese cosmetics e-commerce platform who wanted to reach... ›Read more

Say you are a small retailer selling your widgets online and fortunate enough to see a steady increase in sales in the local market. Encouraged, you realize that those widgets aren’t only unique and valuable, but quite likely just as attractive in the huge market just beyond your home country's borders. As the world is getting smaller, companies like Fedex and Paypal have made it a lot simpler to exchange products and payments with customers in those remote markets in a safe, simple and relatively cheap manner. However, efficiently communicating your offering in all its grandeur st... ›Read more

This is a common question: "How do we order translation through the API, String or the myGengo order form, while not being charged for text such as variable names or comments that we do not want translated?" As you probably know, this is known as "escaping" text from being parsed or translated by our system or by our translators. It's useful especially in code because you can include variables within the text, or to include contextual comments about the nature of the text to aid the translator. To exclude text from the word count of a job, and indicate to the translator that it does not need to be translated, you can wrap text within tr... ›Read more

One common email we get from customers goes something like this: I ordered an English to Japanese translation, but I don't speak Japanese. How can I judge the quality of my translation?  This question is one that I can definitely relate to. I started at myGengo as an intern, and spent a lot of time ordering and checking translations.  You may have noticed our website is localized into Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese (more languages coming soon), and I am not a native speaker of any of these languages. Here are a few techniques I picked up along the way to help make sure I get quality translations every time despite my less-than-perfect l... ›Read more