Tarjama Machine Translation Workshop for Linguists

In our first session of our Localization Webinar Series on July 7th, 2021, we focused on how to set a localization strategy with a well-planned and efficient plan.    Get the full recording of the webinar now! The speakers were experts from the Tarjama family: Emmy Sarkes, our host and Product Marketing Manager; Nour Hussein, Chief Growth Officer; and Mahmoud Abdelaziz, Business Development Director. They brought invaluable insights for businesses that want to expand globally and reach new customers.   Here are the most important takeaways from the event:  In today’s digitalized world, localization is a must rather than a preference. One type of method, language, and content does not work anymore. Customers want customized products and content, addressing them genuinely and individually. The importance of localization practices grows daily, and companies must keep up with the global market to compete.  The key to growing and leaving a mark on the global market is implementing well-defined localization practices, building a solid strategy. Abdelaziz mentions a study showing which methods companies consider the most important for expanding new markets. The first two are social media and international advertising. Localization comes third. He states that localization is at the core of other methods. “This huge trend with global companies prioritizing and investing in localization is because it’s the method to grow and expand into new markets,” he remarks.  Why is Localization So Important?  The most crucial point of localization is the change in customer behaviors. Hussein summarizes the growing importance of localization: “…consumers now expect their content to be localized; they expect it to be personalized; they expect it to be a bit more tailored to them. And when you look at it, users mostly browse content in their native language…When you’re browsing content underneath in your native language, you’re also more likely to purchase content available in your native language. So there’s that element of trust for a brand that communicates to me in my native language, but also the changes in consumer habits and behaviors are causing companies to try to focus heavily on localization.”  English is a global language, but studies show that most international customers prefer seeing content in their native language. E-commerce companies must ensure that customers have the confidence that they are buying the right product. Content that is available in multiple languages also shows a company’s reliability and value. Localization builds trust and relationships between a business and its customers, creating regular engagement and conversion.  Hussein states what drives companies to localize: “…the first thing that you notice, whenever you’re sitting with a client that doesn’t have localization expertise or hasn’t moved into localization yet, is that their first question is, how do we do it? Where are we supposed to start? So there are many questions that they don’t see the end goal, they can’t physically understand when will the money start coming in. …So properly localizing your content would help you start selling faster. And that is pretty much the goal after localization.”   What is the Difference Between Translation and Localization?  People often think translation and localization are the same practices. However, they are parts of end-to-end marketing projects and strategies. Abdelaziz summarizes the topic perfectly: “…they are completely different things. Because localization is the entire process of adapting a product or content to a specific market and a specific market location. Yes, translation is part of the localization process, but so is content creation, so is copywriting. So is modifying your graphics and designs to display your products or your services to the market properly.”  Sarkes states that localization is a holistic practice that involves many departments such as products, marketing, content, software, and translation. The whole company needs to align for a specific goal and work harmoniously. Localization is more comprehensive than translation. It requires advanced assistance from CAT tools such as translation management systems (TMS), similar to CleverSo, and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) like Tarjama’s advanced MT, to get the most out of machine speed and human creativity and accuracy.   How Do You Start?  There are four stages of building a localization strategy:   – Research  What is your goal? Is your content going online? What is your target audience? To save time, it is crucial to properly understand and define your product and its positioning, your customer persona(s), your content, and your touchpoints. Hussein continues: “…Once you get that understanding, and it’s not a comprehensive process. …there are templates that we can offer in support; it’s a fairly simple process, then you can go a little bit more towards the planning part. And this is trying to understand a bit more about your market nature, or your market needs, your content priorities itself. And accordingly, what priorities do I need to have? So some customers who wish to expand to the Middle East, the first thing they come up with is, we want to translate our entire website, and a lot of times we advise them that you don’t necessarily need to do that. Perhaps you can start with a landing page. And then you know, a couple of consistent blogs, because the difference between having a localization strategy is understanding that I’m not just going to translate but instead have the concept of continuous localization.”  – Planning  The planning stage is one of the most important steps as it is the mechanism that carries out the whole practice of localization. Planning once, building one localization strategy, and following it for all markets and customers will not bring value. It should instead be constantly revised, optimized, and renewed. It would be best if you also kept enhancing your content, making it richer and more genuine. Hussein remarks the importance with examples: “… planning properly will also help you as a localization manager or translator for a business, build the case with your organization. So that at the implementation stage, you’re not overwhelmed. …translators, heads of translators, heads of localization, we deal with those who have no time to breathe, they

In the second episode of our Machine Translation Webinar Series on April 7th, 2021, we discussed e-commerce localization and its relationship with machine translation (MT). Attendees tuned in from over 40 countries around the globe and speakers brought the ideal mix of experience from both e-commerce (Noon) and machine translation (Tarjama):  Ajmal Hassan, Vice President of Catalog Quality & Private Label at Noon  Abdallah Nasir, Machine Learning Engineer at Tarjama  Here are our most important takeaways from the event:   Shifted shopping patterns catalyzed e-commerce growth  People are constantly changing what, when, and how they’re buying products and services. With COVID-19, e-commerce witnessed accelerated growth across the globe and within the MENA region, where customers drastically shifted to online shopping. With cities and countries going under complete lockdown, customers became more knowledgeable and aware of e-commerce as a solution to buying what they want and need. Shopping behavior shifted to a focus on necessary essentials, which increased the demand and sales for essential goods. Many customers who were reluctant to use digital methods of payment now use it with confidence – given that a cashless shopping experience became a safer method in the context of the pandemic.   Successful e-commerce focuses on constant adaptation  The challenge with e-commerce is to ensure a seamless and enjoyable shopping experience. With the constantly changing ecosystem that we live in, Ajmal explains that it’s important for an e-commerce company to stay agile, flexible, and adaptable. The focus must be on implementing audit mechanisms that help you identify what’s working and what’s changing, and accordingly adapting and pivoting your strategies quickly to suit the changing consumer needs.   When Noon observed the huge increase in essential goods being bought online, they swiftly bootstrapped and launched Noon Daily – a subscription-based platform that provides customers with groceries and essentials at fast delivery rates.   Automation in e-commerce also proved to be of key value in the past year – where collaboration on digital platforms became essential for all stakeholders across the supply chain, including internal teams, sellers, and customers alike.   Get the full recording of the webinar now! One size does NOT fit all   In today’s age of digitization, shopping has become very personal and customers expect very localized experiences. The majority of non-English natives want to engage with e-commerce platforms in their local language. The challenge is to build a solution where – irrespective of what sellers are offering – customers see all the products and services in their local languages. E-commerce localization should focus on creating a personalized experience for shoppers in these 4 main areas across the platform:  1- Search & discoverability  2- Product detail pages  3- Product reviews  4- Marketing communications  Machine translation helps scale e-commerce  To accommodate the pace and volume of work needed to localize e-commerce while preserving content quality and minimizing costs, machine translation plays an important role. As e-commerce companies scale up, integrating Machine Translation Post Editing (MTPE) into their localization workflow becomes vital. Since MTPE uses both machine and human translation which work hand-in-hand, it helps produce faster translations that are less costly, without jeopardizing the quality. The challenge is to find the balance between raw machine translation, human translation, and MTPE that works for your company goals, workflows, and products.  There’s no golden rule for how much human involvement to use for each product or page, but some points to consider are the product price, ROI, and visibility.  Custom MT models = higher speed and accuracy  Custom MT models can be built for specific industries, including e-commerce. Custom MT models are built on your own data, which means that instant translations are more accurate to your business and industry lingo. This results in faster production of translations, less effort needed for human editing, and higher output quality – when compared to generic MT models.   To get started with your own Custom MT model, Abdallah Nasir explains that you need to send your previously translated data in language pairs to your language technology provider (the more the better!) Machine learning engineers use your data to train MT models, then evaluate and refine the model output.  Be the first to know about our upcoming episodes in the series. Join our mailing list!  Sign up now!

To launch our Machine Translation Webinar Series, we hosted a kick-off event to discuss how businesses can streamline their global growth with Machine Translation. Attendees tuned in from across the globe! What is the Machine Translation Webinar Series? Machine translation is quickly becoming the most dominant and preferred translation model. In a business world where time and cost savings are more critical than ever, machine translation plays an important role for business professionals looking to optimize their multilingual content cycle as well as linguists looking for smarter workflows. However, many companies are still facing challenges and questions around MT. With the MT Webinar Series, Tarjama aims to tackle these challenges by exploring, discussing, and answering the most pressing issues that people face with MT. The series aims to enable companies and individuals alike to make the most out of MT and successfully integrate it into their localization workflows. For the kick-off event, we hosted experts from the AI and machine learning field to share their insights: Hassan Sawaf, Founder of aixplain Hassan has 25+ years of experience in employing cutting-edge technologies for mission-critical business operations. Ruba Jaikat, Machine Learning Engineer at Tarjama Ruba is one of Tarjama’s leading machine learning engineers, with hands-on experience delivering innovative machine learning solutions. Here are our most important takeaways from the kick-off event: 1) MT is essential for fast, cost-efficient, secure high-quality translations In today’s digital world, businesses looking for globalization are realizing the limitations of human-only translations – and for that reason, we see many businesses integrating machine translation into their localization workflows. 10 years ago, people thought that MT will replace human translators but in today’s reality, MT is enabling humans versus competing with them. When Hassan started the AI team at eBay, a challenge was to make the content for billions of items across inventories available to everyone in multiple language pairs – and as close to real-time as possible. At that point, human translators alone could not suffice, which is where MT came in as a powerful solution. MT automates a huge part of the translation process, where the machine does the heavy-lifting and leaves space for the human translator to focus on the creative elements, or in other words, Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE). We’re seeing MTPE being heavily adopted by businesses because it improves the productivity of translations and helps maintain the momentum of translation needs at a reduced cost, while also preserving the quality of the translation. 2) The 4 main types of MT service levels & their use-cases We’re seeing most Language Service Providers (LSPs) offering their clients and customers four main types of translation services. Each service type varies in human involvement, delivery time, cost, quality, and style. – Raw MT – Translations are generated by MT alone. Raw MT is associated with the fastest delivery, lowest cost, and fair quality, and is often used for non-client-facing material that isn’t high profile. – Light MTPE – Linguists make minor modifications to Raw MT. Translations will have no grammatical mistakes or mistranslations, but they just might not comply with the translation style and guidelines of the client. – Full MTPE – Linguists modify Raw MT based on client guidelines and specifications. Full MTPE allows a linguist to bring Raw MT output to a human-like publishable quality translation. Because of the higher expenses in terms of cost and time that comes with it, MTPE is often only used with content that has a large target audience, generates revenue, or needs to meet legal requirements. – Exclusive/Custom MT – A custom MT model is built based on the client’s data. This is a great option when a business requires a higher quality of that provided by Raw MT but still wants instant translations or does not want to expose the data to humans for privacy reasons. Since it’s trained on the client’s data, Exclusive MT takes into consideration industry- and client-specific lingo and jargon, thus producing higher-quality translations. Get the full recording of the webinar now! 3) The Arabic world’s challenge is domain-specific data Arabic is a difficult language with many different forms and dialects. While generic Arabic MT engines have come a long way because of the huge amount of data used to develop these engines; terminology may not suit every subject area, resulting in mistranslations in particular business domains. Ruba explains that Tarjama’s MT was built to solve this challenge for businesses looking to localize their content for the Arab world. Its engine is trained on high-quality professionally-edited data accumulated over 12 years across various industries, resulting in accurate Arabic translations across a variety of custom-domains. 5) The future (and present!) of MT is big As personalized content is becoming increasingly important, we see the future of MT will have to involve dialect-aware MT engines that understand different dialects and forms of language. Another area that MT will need to conquer is low-resource languages. With over 6,000 languages in the world, MT is performing on an average level for the top 50-100 languages, with room for improvement for many of those. For the remaining thousands, MT will need to catch up in the near future. MT will also need to be able to integrate with other AI solutions. As businesses are looking to work smarter and faster in a more streamlined, holistic fashion, MT will need to adapt to that by integrating with other technologies across the entire business workflow. What’s Next? In our upcoming webinars, we’ll continue discussing the most pressing aspects of Machine Translation to enable companies and individuals alike to utilize this powerful technology. Our audience in the previous Machine Translation Webinar expressed their interest in various topics including data security concerns around MT, quality control of MT output, and custom-domain MT engines, which are all topics we plan on covering in our upcoming episodes. Stay tuned! Be the first to know about our upcoming episodes in the series. Join our mailing list! Sign Up