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Babble Makes Business for
Translators
The world is clamoring to learn Chinese, as translation
companies have put Chinese interpretation at the top of their
roster of languages to meet the rising demand from their
customers. "There are more activities between China and the US
and there is more litigation in the court between Chinese
companies and US companies." says Samuel Chong, a
court-certified Chinese interpreter based in Los Angeles.
by Shearon Roberts
November 4, 2009
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.: The world is clamoring to learn
Chinese, as translation companies have put Chinese
interpretation at the top of their roster of languages to meet
the rising demand from their customers.
Interpreters have been sought to translate anything from
animated films to popular television dramas. Telecommunications
companies are piloting global mobile services testing cell phone
translators for tourists visiting China. And even search engine
giant Google put Chinese out front as the test language of its
new Google Translation when it relaunched the service in 2006.
“The demand has definitely gone up,” said Samuel Chong, a
court-certified Chinese interpreter based in Los Angeles. “There
are more activities between China and the US and there is more
litigation in the court between Chinese companies and US
companies.”
Chong, a Beijing native who studied in the US, initially began
private tutoring in 2002 for Americans with Chinese spouses
wanting to better communicate with their Chinese in-laws. He now
splits his time teaching Chinese translation at a University of
California, Los Angeles extension campus and providing
professional translation through his company, Abacus Chinese
Translation Services.
Business has also become far more diverse, Chong said. His work
has run the gamut from translating an interview between media
mogul Rupert Murdoch and a Chinese television executive, to
translating the post-production DVD content for the hit
animation film Kung Fu Panda.
And the high demand means Chinese translators can command a
higher price than before. They are currently charging anywhere
from two cents per word to as high as $1 per word, considerably
higher than other languages, Chong said. Tutoring sessions can
cost anywhere from $30 to $45 per hour.
For translation companies that have never offered Chinese, the
language has become a boost for business in this economy.
“When we started, I thought that it would be only Spanish to
English and English to Spanish,” said Daiana Bajuk, president of
Miami-based Seal Translations. “But what I realized is the
market is moving in a different direction. Now we have more
demand than ever for Mandarin to English, English to Mandarin,
and Mandarin to Spanish.”
More than 80 percent of Bajuk’s new clients now request Mandarin
to English. Another 10 percent want Mandarin to Spanish and
another 8 percent want English to Mandarin.
“Mandarin is by far the strongest of what our clients are
demanding,” Bajuk said. “Many of the clients are importing and
exporting to China.”
However, given the complexity of Chinese characters, traditional
translators said it could be a long time before the translation
technology takes any the new demand.
“Right now I don’t see any competition as there is still no
single good translation technology,” Chong said. “I do see
Google Translation is getting better everyday. But that might
get rid of only some of the services an interpreter can offer.”
That is why when Google re-launched its Goolge Translation in
2006 it used its own in-house designed machine translation
system, instead of outside technology.
“They way we’re building machine translation services is we’re
learning machine translation out of existing text,” said Franz
Och, Google’s principal research scientist on Google
Translation. “A large amount of text material is available
online and a lot of what we learn is from text that may not be
perfectly well-formed.”
The power of the search engine allows Google to feed the machine
enough new and existing vocabulary to translate web pages as
closely as a person would.
“If there are terms we don’t know, we transliterate that term
from English to Chinese, or we leave the term in English,” Och
said. Since machine translation is mostly literal, identifying
new Chinese characters used on the web allows the machine to
constantly update its vocabulary database.
“We wanted to move machine translation beyond the status it was
at the time,” Och said. “We apply really large amounts of data
to the problem.”
Taking machine translation from literal to concept translation
is the same tool California-based IP company JaJah Inc. adopted
when it pilot-tested its mobile Chinese translation service
during the Beijing Olympics.
Some 50,000people used the service during the trial run, said
Jajah CEO Trevor Healy. Tourists or athletes in China clicked on
a Website link via their phones, entered their phone numbers and
spoke the phrase they wanted in Chinese or in English. After a
few seconds, they would receive and automated response in the
desired language on their cell phones.
“We relied 100 percent on machine translation,” Healy said. “We
don’t’ do linear translation. We try to provide what the gist of
the message is.”
Thanks to a partnership with IBM, Jajah.Babel’s machines had
access to a large vocabulary database to provide more than just
simple literal translation, Healy explained. A lack of
vocabulary is that held back machine translation in the past, he
added.
“Machines will try to analyze the third or fourth word and then
they will try to translate linearly,” Healy said. “When that
happens, the consumer does not trust the service. They will say
this is rubbish and will not use the service anymore.”
Healy said the company could officially offer Jajah.Babel to
Jajah subscribers by 2010, and then partner with Chinese or US
cell phone providers to market the service further.
For telecommunications companies such as Jajah, translating
Chinese language via cell phones makes good financial sense.
“It’s a function of how widely spoken is the language and the
economics of it.” Healy said. “We’ve been learning English,
German, French and Spanish, so you have a dichotomy between this
country that has risen it stature and a lack of people with the
language skills.”
This article can also be found at
http://www.certifiedchinesetranslation.com/09/1104-Business-for-Translators.html
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