Will Machine Translation (MT) Change The Localization Landscape? - Episode 96
Poppy is the Machine Translation (MT) Specialist at Vistatec. With almost a decade of experience in the localization industry, Poppy has acquired expertise in several customer service roles, ranging from localization, and quality assurance, to project management and machine translation deployment in a multi-language environment.
Poppy shares studying Spanish and English literature and language at Oxford University and learning Japanese. With a real passion for languages, it makes sense that Poppy is involved in the world of machine translation at Vistatec. Poppy, based in Tarragona, Spain, provides insights into the role at Vistatec, including the responsibilities around machine translation solutions advice and strategy as well as MT feasibility analysis and engine customization.
Poppy discusses an early desire to work in languages but was unaware of where this world existed. With a combination of understanding languages and being an organized person, having learned the principles of organization. The desire to work in languages has developed into a belief that localization is so interesting. Poppy finds the localization industry more intriguing because she now works with so many different people worldwide.
Poppy explains how she believes that what has kept her loving localization is because it brings you closer to everybody else. It’s about adapting to cultures, languages, and other people’s lifestyles rather than blanketing the world with one single language or one perspective. She comments how it is so attractive for that reason, in addition to the fact that as an industry, it is always moving and constantly changing because, to some degree, it mirrors the world.
María asks Poppy about the data and the machine translation technology when everything can be customizable for a client. Poppy conveys how the client’s data and translation memory status are evaluated, understanding what has been translated already. Vistatec can focus on critical terms a client doesn’t want to get wrong.
For example, Poppy discusses how in public-facing situations, you can’t get terms wrong; it has to be the client’s name, exactly as it is, and the engine can’t be getting that wrong so there are specific terms that need to be high visibility.
The high visibility terms need to be correct, so you can implement that in the glossary and continue to train the engine just for the client’s specific requirements.
Content is customized towards the customer’s specific terms, helping improve the engine quality. You can add varying levels of editing, including human linguistic expertise.
María and Poppy discuss how Vistatec’s Machine Translation solutions can significantly improve project turnaround times and reduce costs, enabling automatic translations. María conveys how Vistatec has been pioneering intelligent automated translation solutions for many years, and they share why this is important to Vistatec’s customers and the wider localization industry.