Technology
There is always a healthy tension between the need for quality and cost-effectiveness.
At Teneo we harness technology to help with the translation process and add in the experience and judgement of excellent linguists to ensure that quality is maintained.
There is a difficult balance to be struck and we always err on the side of caution when looking at the use of technology in our work.
Translation technology
There are two types of technology commonly available to the translation sector; Machine Translation (MT) and Computer Aided Translation (CAT)
Machine translation is the mechanical swapping of words that have a similar meaning which sounds great in theory but in practice means that the output can be somewhat suspect.
The problem is that in many cases there won’t be a directly corresponding word between two languages.
At the same time, context and language structures may be totally different meaning that the simple substitution rarely produces a satisfactory result.
As a consequence, you’ll understand why we at Teneo never use Machine Translation.
Computer-Aided Translation is the use of a technological solution to aid a human translator.
The system doesn’t do the translation as much as providing a suite of tools that the linguist can use to carry out their work quickly and accurately.
Typically this will include things like spellcheckers, databases and editing environments that make the translation process smoother.
We are happy to use CAT as it increases the productivity of our translators whilst at the same time maintaining the quality of the output meaning that we are able to offer a lower price to our customers.
And of course, all of our finished work is quality checked before it leaves our premises.
