Machine translation
The right solution for your texts?

You have specific expectations when it comes to the quality of your texts. Occasionally, you may have a text that needs to be translated quickly and cost-effectively, and that doesn’t need to be of the same high quality as a text translated by a professional translator. In such cases, a machine translation might be the right solution for you. There is currently a vast range of different professional systems for machine translation.

Different systems and what they offer

Machine translation is not the right option for most texts and most clients. However, if you think this service could be of interest to you, we will be happy to advise you. We can recommend the most suitable system based on what you need from your translation or, for example, how important your company’s terminology is.

Openly available systems

The latest openly available systems that are free to use or can be acquired as a private company version all work using neural networks and are capable of delivering acceptable results.

The low-down

Openly available systems such as DeepL Pro cannot be trained using your company’s terminology. Therefore, if you have texts for which adherence to your corporate language and terminology isn’t important, these systems may be the right solution. After receiving your consent, we use a plug-in to translate using the machine translation platform of your choice.

The company versions of these systems also offer good levels of data protection, as any data you feed into the system is not accessible or visible to third parties. However, it is important to note that any data translated using DeepL Pro is processed in Germany. If you have any texts containing highly sensitive information that, for example, cannot leave Switzerland, we recommend that you have them translated by a human translator. Alternatively, if you want texts containing sensitive data to be machine translated, we recommend using your own system, which will give you (or us) control over server location and data security. Read on to find out more.

Depending on your requirements, we use DeepL Pro (or your preferred system) independently or in conjunction with your translation memory. More about this below.

Diction’s technological wizardry: machine translation with a translation memory

Let’s assume you decide to use DeepL Pro, but you’re a bit concerned about the fact that the system hasn’t learned your company’s terminology or corporate language. But you do have a translation memory filled with every single sentence we ever translated for you. We created the perfect solution: the Diction studio creator.

The Diction studio creator is a plug-in that we developed to enable our TMS to automatically access your data in SDL Trados Studio and select which assets (e.g. a translation memory) to integrate into the translation project. The studio creator then creates a pre-translation of your text using information from your previous translations that are saved in the translation memory. If a sentence is a perfect match or (depending on your requirements) very similar to the text being translated, the studio creator uses this for the translation. Sentences that are not similar to the text in the new translation are rejected.

The studio creator then sends anything it was not able to translate from the translation memory to DeepL Pro, which translates this remaining text without using the translation memory, as it is not able to access it. We recommend using our post-editing service for texts translated in this manner. One of our in-house language experts will then revise the entire text, ensuring consistency between the translation memory pre-translation and the DeepL Pro translation.

Company machine translation systems

In addition to openly available systems, neural machine translation systems are available that can be acquired (or built) specifically for your company and then located at your premises.

The low-down

What is the advantage of using one of these machine translation systems? This type of machine translation system can be trained using your terminology, which means that the results become better with every single translation. With systems that have been able to learn a lot (i.e. that have been used to do a large amount of translations), you can even leave out the post-editing stage for certain texts that do not need to be of a high quality. And, if you need to translate sensitive data, using an internal company-specific system is the ideal solution.

Using this type of neural machine translation system is an excellent choice for texts that need to be of a higher linguistic and terminological quality – and when you want to have control over your data.

Our Head of Terminology and Translation Technology is currently carrying out a range of tests with various systems and collaborating with a number of clients.

Your company’s machine translation system

Some of our bigger clients have an internal language services department and use Diction’s translators as well as their own. If this is the case at your company, you may be considering acquiring or building your own machine translation system. We will be more than happy to help you, and can also offer advice or assistance with testing the accuracy of your system. Just ask us.

Post-editing

We recommend post-editing – having your translation checked for errors – for machine translations. Even highly sophisticated machine translation systems make mistakes. Find out more about this service here.

What our clients say about us

Real MT experts

Diction has some real machine translation experts on their team. They managed to do exactly what we wanted by creating a kind of hybrid system that combines the use of machine translation, translation memories and post-editing. This system allows us to request the right translation quality depending on what the text will be used for, which means we can tailor the price to our needs and reduce our overall costs. Our team all know exactly how to place orders and were impressed with the quality right from the start.

Roger RölliTeam Leader Marketing Services, AMAG Import Ltd

Professional and solution-oriented
Diction always offers us a professional solution for all of our language needs. Translation, editing, copywriting – they always complete projects reliably, quickly, and with a clear focus on finding solutions.

Robert HämmerleManaging Director Hämmerle und Partner