During the 2021 Global Ready Conference Keynote, Smartling’s Founder and CEO, Jack Welde, delivered a company update, outlook on the industry, and the latest product announcements.
The session opens by welcoming the audience from 56 different countries to the online edition of Global Ready Conference and sharing why coming together as the industry matters.
Watch the keynote session in its entirety below
Why Connecting Our Community Matters
Global Ready Conference is an annual opportunity for Smartling to meet with customers and translation and localization professionals to learn more about their evolving needs and hear about their vision for the future of translation.
In recent years, Smartling has expanded these objectives to reimagine the conference as an opportunity for the entire industry to come together. Global Ready Conference exists because Smartling understands that words matter and words have a real-world impact. In the past 12+ months, this has never been more true.
Many industries and companies worldwide had to be innovative with their digital and globalization strategy, some having to change their entire service delivery model while navigating the pandemic.
Companies are moving the world with words through Smartling by creating opportunities for people to adopt at-home fitness options, explore video streaming options for the entire family, deploy platforms to provide critical medical access to people, and more.
Today, Smartling embarks to be known for all things translation and everything that a modern global enterprise needs to effectively and efficiently reach all of the customers around the world.
The world got a lot smaller in 2020. More words are moving online. More and more customers want and expect to interact with the brands they love, the products they care about, and the information they need in their preferred native language.
This is leading to companies translating more and more content, and this trend isn’t going to stop.
Better, Cheaper, and Faster Translations
Jack Welde also shared what Smartling is doing to provide translation technology in a way that every customer wants it: better, cheaper, faster.
To fulfill those needs and wants, Smartling is building its own enterprise neural machine translation engine to provide MT engines that can be customized for your brand using your brand voice, global style guide, terms from your glossary, etc. As a result, you can produce better-quality translations for your brand at a cheaper rate with a faster turnaround.
When Smartling translators have access to this technology, their process becomes more efficient. Then, the quality of translation increases, meaning the translation sounds more natural to the reader. Translation and localization now take less effort, time, keystrokes, and edit distance to make the necessary changes to make that content fit for purpose.
Machine translation is vital, but it will only yield great results if you have both excellent technology and great humans in the loop. All of these things where the machine and the science balanced with human preferences, human oversight, and human validation create an exciting opportunity.
To watch the keynote session in its entirety, go to https://www.smartling.com/conference-on-demand/.
Key Smartling Product Releases 2021
Andrew Saxe, Vice President of Product at Smartling, presented the part of the session. Additional colleagues shared key product updates, new integrations, and more.
Improved Global Content Search across all projects
- New filters for tags, dates, and string ingestion warning
- Functionality for saving a set of filters for one-click preset searches
- Attachments to jobs that allow adding reference files to a job and writing more contexts and backgrounds for linguists
- Priority jobs that help organize important jobs for all users, including agencies and linguists, with a separate search queue and easy ordering
- New job briefing to the CAT tool that ensures linguists see the most important information about a job as soon as they open the CAT tool
Transcreation: An all-new interface to write creative translations
Support for transcreation has been added, providing a new experience for writing creative translations. Linguists can add multiple potential translation options and back translations and then select the most appropriate translation for the context.
More flexibility for Quality Checks
Now part of the linguistic package, quality checks can change to match the type of content being translated, the translation memory, and the glossary used.
Post-translation Dynamic Workflows
This recent update to Dynamic Workflows allows for decision steps after the translation step. This helps simplify workflow setup and provides more options for routing content, such as skipping a step if it was re-edited or not edited.
Linguistic Quality Assurance in Beta
Smartling also has introduced a new set of tools for quality assurance and measurement. This new LQA tool, built directly into the CAT tool and review mode, determines if they contain any objective errors using standard methodology. This new update allows for quality data to be captured at any point in the workflow.
Addressing Translation Challenges with the Improved Glossary Management Tool
Jennifer Wong, Product Manager at Smartling, briefed on the updates with the Glossary Management Tool.
Here are three key challenges the customers face when creating and maintaining a quality glossary:
- Identifying terms at scale for the glossary
- Documenting term context
- Updating content dynamically
To address these challenges, Smartling’s glossary tool has been redesigned. In addition, Smartling is building a new AI-powered term finder that enables the Smartling platform to identify terms to create comprehensive glossaries for the customers.
Newly added to the Glossary Management Tool:
- Visual Context: Visual context can give translators and glossary managers the ability to understand exactly how terms are used, especially for words with multiple meanings. Context is now available in the glossary manager to provide a visual reference of the use of the term in context.
- String Context: Glossary managers can identify and mark project strings where the terms are correctly used, giving translators more context and a better understanding of the best practices of using these terms.
Smartling now incorporates appropriate terminology when using machine translation, so the translated content is more aligned with your brand. Additionally, Smartling will surface existing content and allow you to review and update your content quickly. When you change the glossary term, whether it is your brand name, product name, or even just the new word you prefer to use, the tool can help mark existing content to be reviewed and updated. This will help ensure consistent brand identity across your content.
Ways to Use Machine Translation in Smartling
Managing source content and understanding quality is essential when using machine translation. Here is a suite of tools that can help address quality concerns:
- MT Auto-Select
- Terminology Infused MT
- MT Quality Estimation
- Human-in-the-loop
Key updates to connectors and integrations
- A complete rebuild of Zendesk, Contentful, Salesforce Marketing, and Sketch integrations
- Important updates to the GitHub integration
- New Connectors: Yext, Drupal 9, Figma, Salesforce Knowledge, AEM Cloud, and Episerver
- ContentStack Integration
Smartling announces the launch of Smartling+
Finally, Jack Welde wrapped up the keynote session by making an exciting announcement: the launch of Smartling+.
What is Smartling+?
Smartling+ is a bundle of translations and language services with technology and software services. It's an innovative approach to pricing that considers the holistic perspective of what the customers are saying they need.
All-new Smartling+ is made to provide a complete solution that addresses everything you need to deliver high-quality, high-impact translations so that your business feels like it’s local to your end-user.
Smartling+ is the fastest way to continuously publish multilingual content that takes into consideration the layers of nuances of your global brand, style, tone of voice, and words and phrases that define your brand. Smartling+ is a pathway to making it easier for companies to benefit from Smartling’s technology.
Watch the keynote session in its entirety
