Case Study of Trantex - Walden Family website
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1. TER FO QUALIT OUR About This Issue David Walden Creativity from Adversity Three Breakthroughs at Maeda Corporation Matabee Kenji Maeda Case Study of Trantex Described by Kaija P ysti to Shoji Shiba and David Walden EMENT Reprint No RP12700 Page 2 Page 3 Assessment of Results of Applying the Language Processing Method to Reduce the Experiment Cycle Time for the NASA Microgravity Research Program Dr Mark C Lee and John F Newcomb Beyond Lean Building Sustainable Business and People Success through New Ways of Thinking Jamie Flinchbaugh Theoretical Foundations of The Seven Infrastructures Model Matthew W Ford James R Evans Charles H Matthews and Gary Burchill Volume 10 Number 2 Page 29 Page 37 Page 51 Winter 2001 Copyright 2001 The Center for Quality of Management Inc Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page To copy otherwise to republish to post to servers or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and or a fee Copying is by permission of The Center for Quality of Management Inc e One Alewife Center Suite 450 Cambridge Massachusetts 02140 USA Telephone 617 873 8950 Email publications cqm org The Center f2. a team instead of using indi vidual free lancers working at home and requiring pre booking of their time Trantex could be more flexible than most translation agencies and do the screen shots as late as possible when the software was almost frozen This both saved work and improved quality as the software was almost stable and the screen shots needed to be done only once Having a team work on the translation also enabled Trantex to quickly move more people to do the screen shots An important flexibility issue was the fact that unlike most other agencies Trantex expected all people to be able to handle several tasks in the translation process Most agencies for example used graphics specialists to do the screen shots This meant that they had a limited pool of resources for that activity and had to start early in the process Trantex had several people who were able to do both translations and screen shots This meant that Trantex for example could quickly have five additional people doing screen shots at the end of the process instead of having only two graphics specialists who were overloaded Trantex did have specialists too but they concentrated on the final inspections fine tuning and very special tasks that were small in vol ume In any case the help file and print documentation went through a translation memory similar to that used for the software itself Finally an official release date for the software could be set by th
3. functions etc These files contain lots of hypertext links and search keywords that also need to be translated e Printed documentation tutorial reference etc manuals that are printed and bound or available on CD ROM typically in PDF format The manuals often include screen shots of the software __ Screen shots are images included in that have to be regenerated from the localized software Some the documentation of what would be times developing a screen shot takes much time seen on a computer display e Sample documents letters spreadsheets presentations etc which the user can use for practice These must often be changed to correspond to local conventions e g business letters have dif ferent styles checks are not used in Scandinavia requiring examples of how to balance a checkbook to be rewritten clip art must use soccer balls rather than American football helmets etc e Web sites most software systems nowadays also have a related web site with a lot of dynamic information about the software The site needs to be translated and built In the mid 1980s much of the text to be translated was embedded in code in worst cases in hexadecimal fields Translators did not want to touch the code and programmers did not want to give the code to translators because the translators could introduce bugs in the code In addition most translators worked on typewriters or used dictation which was impossible for software
4. quality prose and developing the appropriate computer systems and customer inter action processes Learning opportunity from outside During each stage there was on going learning from outside Kaija first learned about how translation was done and how it could be done better Group members with different backgrounds then learned from each other The entire group learned from customers Time and milestones As described this case took place over a period of years and there were constant milestones driven by business pressures Support from the top Obviously Kaija provided the initial drive to start and grow Trantex As a relatively small company Kaija and a few others on the top management team continued to drive an ongoing change breakthrough process acquiring needed resources new hires the necessary financial backing Because Trantex was initially a startup company it didn t have to worry about adverse reactions from other divisions and corporate offices that so many breakthrough activities have to struggle against Balancing values It seems clear that Kaija and Trantex had a core ideol ogy that allowed and encouraged change but that prevented them from reckless change This core ideology involved the mixing of lin guistic skills and technology and with computer skills and technology in a way that embedded Trantex in the customers processes At the end of the day however the infrastructure developed at Trantex se
5. these balancing values must modulate the forces for breakthrough as the latter are being applied The Trantex case is more or less consistent with the cycle stages and infrastructure just sketched With regard for the cycle of breakthrough Kaija initially saw a need for an alternative to the conventional approach of giving one translation job to one translator who was a language specialist Her commitment to breakthrough grew as she struggled to do translations herself Kaija s mental breakthrough was to see that technology and technology people could be used in conjunction with language specialists The technical breakthrough involved creating a new business model of a translation organization versus freelance translators and applying computer technology and people With regard to the stages of breakthrough Kaija began with her own initiator s breakthrough She then gathered a group of people and they built a new kind of company applying computer technology in a new way group s breakthrough Whether the Trantex case involved a genuine partner s breakthrough stage is debatable On the one hand Trantex clearly began to work with its customers IBM Microsoft in a new way always striving to make Trantex s effort more compatible with the customer s larger process rather than only striving for quality translations Ultimately however rather than continuing to expand as they diffused their new approach with many partners
6. time keep your own identity and keep learning With one customer it is relatively easy to do everything the way that customer wants but then you stop innovating With more customers you learn all the time They learned a lot from their customers They also were fortunate to have companies like IBM and HP as first customers with their existing systems and high quality standards The Software Localization Problem and a Process for Doing It With IBM DisplayWriter Trantex got into software localization which required even more technical skills than translating computer and soft ware manuals Localization of a piece of software such as the IBM DisplayWriter or Microsoft Windows or Word includes e The core software itself all the words the software routinely displays to the user such as in menus on windows in dialog boxes exception messages and so on These translations must be tested so that the translated words fit within the allowed graphical con text correctly describe the options offered to the user by the Volume 10 Number 2 Winter 2001 20 CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad software have a selection letter that corresponds to the translation such as Yes becoming Si in Spanish etc e The help files databases that can be accessed often via a Help menu that provide on line key word searches for descriptions of commands and functions provide tutorials in using commands and
7. a multi skilled team and understanding the entire process instead of using sepa rate free lance employees who only specialized in one task each The conventional thinking in the translation industry had been that due to changes in work volume companies had to use freelance em ployees to minimize fixed salary costs Trantex took a completely different approach hiring the people and having them work at the Trantex office Although this meant fixed salary costs it also brought much more flexibility people could be trained to be multi skilled sud den changes in schedules and volume of work were easier to handle because people could work with two projects at a time and no pre book ing of free lance employees was necessary Naturally it also required high enough work volume to smooth peaks and valleys but that came from maintaining high customer satisfaction Trantex put rigorous emphasis on quality meaning overall quality of translations delivery times reporting communicating with cus tomers etc Kaija believes they spent much more effort on finding out how to provide overall customer satisfaction than many of their com petitors Trantex worked more like a consulting company than a translation company which typically would have a black box approach text in text out and fairly little communication in between The black box approach worked for traditional small translations consisting of a few pages or for books translat
8. after a number of freelance workers were pre booked the customer might slip the time it shipped the work to the translation company leaving the company with freelance workers on the payroll but no project for them to work on Thus companies depending on freelance workers as a way to avoid fixed costs in the end often had a nearly equivalent form of overhead Winter 2001 23 CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad Key Success Factors Over Trantex s life Kaija and her people gradually evolved from her initial approach of sitting down alone with a manual to be translated and doing it essentially manually as a cottage industry to the technol ogy based system described in the previous section At one point Microsoft did a survey of its localization vendors The results of the survey showed Trantex having highest quality but not the highest prices When asked what she thinks the key success factors were Kaija lists the following in priority order e Thinking of localization as a process rather than a cottage industry e Bringing the technology and translation people and methods together including cross training so the people from the two cul tures had good insight into each other s methods and cultures Getting deeply familiar with the customers e g Microsoft s and IBM s release methods so the Trantex process could be best inte grated with the customer process Having people on company premises working as
9. anslator All in all the translation memory supported a remarkable productivity and quality increase over what had typically been possible with human translators working alone The localization process for the software doesn t end with transla tion down to the phrase level The software has to be tested to make sure it still operates sensibly in its localized format As mentioned Volume 10 Number 2 Winter 2001 22 CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad earlier translated phrases must fit into the available dialog box they must describe the required interaction between user and software in a clear way in the new language etc Thus Trantex found it needed to develop a test function to augment its translation function In addition to the software help files and print documentation were also part of the package that needed to be translated Usually all of this material came from the manufacturer at same time and went through the same revision cycles that software did In some cases the manufac turer sent the help files and documentation later Sometimes Trantex would try to skip the early rounds of revision of the help files and documentation until the software had stabilized to try to reduce the number of update rounds One change in a software screen could mean 150 changed screen shots so it was important to try to do the screen shots as late as possible Again by hiring people who worked in the premises and worked as
10. d in drawing programs and a file with the text only for final submission Volume 10 Number 2 Winter 2001 76
11. e manufacturer and at this point the final version of the documentation would have to be finished typically on a tight schedule that would allow the translated documentation to get to the printer in time for the documentation to be available with the product on the release date The major additional problem in translating the documentation was trans lating the myriad screen shots in the documentation that is running the software to produce the screens that needed to be shot Of course the Trantex combination of human translators being coordinated and aided by translation memories also applied to the sample documents and web sites that are now a part of many software products Initially there was not much MAT software available other than what Trantex was developing itself Later on big manufacturers developed proprietary tools to help with various tasks and Trantex developed its own macros with which they could do large searches and replaces across a large number of flies and do consistency checks e g always a space after a period ending a sentence etc Also for example IBM began to use SGML for all their documentation Volume 10 Number 2 5 Translations companies depending primarily on freelance workers and anticipating a large translation job had to pre book the more skilled freelance translators so the company had the capacity to do the job once it arrived for instance a month in advance for a four month period However
12. ed by one person However software which is constantly updated requires constant communication and reporting and an organized process for communications Sale of the Company By 1997 Trantex had expanded to 220 people An industry consolida tion was happening with the big four of Bowne L amp H Mendez Lionbridge and Berlitz buying up the smaller regional or national com panies The pressure for this consolidation came substantially from the desire of the big customers e g Microsoft IBM to deal with only a few multilingual suppliers rather than single language suppliers in each country Volume 10 Number 2 Winter 2001 24 CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad Trantex was courted by several companies After some soul searching Kaija et al noted they had been working very hard for many years they had an excellent financial offer on the table if they didn t sell they might not be able to compete in the face of the industry consolida tion and the dot com balloon was soaring and Trantex was facing increasing competition for its best people Kaija and her husband a long time key participant in Trantex were the two major shareholders owning over 60 percent of the shares and there were eight other share holders Most of the others were turning 30 with young families and large mortgages and to them a large windfall made a big difference Overall it made more sense to secure a major financial gain than to f
13. ee stages of breakthrough are shown as three breakthrough iterations across the middle of the figure Each breakthrough iteration is an instance of the breakthrough cycle shown in Figure 1 Commitment Mental break through Technical breakthrough although in the Figure 3 each cycle includes an additional step of Sensing that a change is needed The total process involves appropriate milestones a supportive architecture struc ture processes human financial technological and other resources time on going learning from the outside world and especially support Volume 10 Number 2 Winter 2001 26 CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad from the top to provide the necessary resources to drive the process and often to protect the breakthrough activity from the rest of the orga nization which does not yet understand the need for the breakthrough activity As hinted in Figure 3 and its description of the infrastructure a lot of force has to be brought together to create breakthrough However with so much force for breakthrough there must also be a moderating influ ence to prevent reckless efforts such as efforts too unconnected to the core capabilities of the organization In Figure 3 these are called balanc ing values and of course to some extent these are part of a feedback loop reacting to the results of the force for breakthrough However waiting for feedback may be too slow Thus to a considerable extent
14. ems to have been unable to undertake the next stage of breakthrough e g to becoming more than a national company without being deemed more risky to the Trantex people than selling the company was at least in the face of the circumstances Trantex then faced Kaija elaborates as follows on the situation in which they found themselves The environment was changing very rapidly localization companies were being bought in all countries very quickly meaning that Trantex would have lost its partners Trantex did run multilingual projects for its customers buying the translations from partners who were similar companies to Trantex in their respective countries and there would have been too little time for Trantex to develop new opportunities on its own Also the dot com boom was heating up and people were enticed to change companies rapidly by offering them higher salaries and stock options In many cases even the customers of Trantex tried to hire people from Trantex An attempt to take lots of outside capital and join the buying spree would only have driven prices for the national companies higher to a level which would have become far too high especially in hindsight as the economy is now slowing down So although the infrastructure was providing good results it was going against the tide at that time 1997 In the environment of today 2001 things are quite different again and it is very probable that a similar infrastructure will emer
15. er to which P ysti again reacted Throughout this iterative process P ysti clarified her own thinking about the essence of the Trantex case Creation of Trantex In 1983 Kaija P ysti was a graduate student in physics at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland She saw a request ona bulletin board from a company importing computers for help translating a little user s manual from English into Finnish Having an interest in languages and computers she answered the advertisement At the time and for some years to come translations were the province of people trained in languages and translation agencies had a stable of freelance translators to whom the agencies sent material to be translated The actual translation activities were essentially done as cottage industry Kaija translated the booklet her customer was satisfied and other translation jobs came her way In 1983 she started Trantex to do more translation work with herself as the sole employee residing on the premises of another company for which she was freelancing She rented one room and office services from the company in which she resided Along the way it occurred to Kaija that the translation process might be converted from essentially an individual art into more of an industrial process Also along the way Kaija began to have more translation opportunities than she could handle alone and she in volved a couple of other people from the University of Technolog
16. ge from one or more companies Taking such an infrastructure multinational will require finding like minded people in different countries and perhaps franchising the concept to them Td Volume 10 Number 2 Winter 2001 28 CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad Production Team Eric Bergemann Publisher David Walden Editor Janice Hall Kevin M Young Design amp Production COM Officers Ray Stata Chairman Gary Burchill President Paul van der Wansem Treasurer William Wise Clerk The Center for Quality of Management Journal is a forum for disseminating the experience of organizations learning to implement modern management practices It seeks to capture experiences and ideas that may be useful to others working to create customer driven continuously improving organizations The CQM Journal is refereed However it is not an academic publication Experiences and ideas will be published if they seem likely to be useful to others seeking to improve their organizations Send to The Center for Quality of Management Journal Editorial Department One Alewife Center Suite 450 Cambridge MA 02140 Tel 617 873 8950 Fax 617 873 8980 E mail publications cqm org If you have thoughts for a paper and you would like to discuss it with us please write call or submit an outline We welcome your ideas Final Manuscript Requirements Entire manuscript should be double spaced including foo
17. here there the Most translation companies sent their translation work to separate free computer uses grammar rules to doa lance employees each of whom worked on his or her piece of the job using translation the translation memories separately This meant that different translators entered different translations into their own separate translation memories in their own computers Trantex however hired people who worked on the Trantex premises using the same translation memory database online In addition Trantex had language experts who constantly monitored the translation memory databases This ensured much better consistency of the databases so that each phrase only had one approved translation in the memory In some cases two different translations were necessary for one original depending on the context In these cases it was important that the person doing validation made sure that both occurrences could be found Some time after the alpha software was available updates to the soft ware began arriving There would usually be at least five rounds of updates and could be as many as 40 rounds before final software release The English phrases in each software update were compared with the existing translations in the translation memory and appropri ately revised or new translations were added to the translation memory Thus the translation memory provided efficiency and consistency from update to update as well as from translator to tr
18. languages and geographic areas Trantex remained essentially a one language one country provider When faced with the requirement to expand or possibly succumb to overwhelming competi tion they chose to merge themselves with a larger company In some sense this was another form of partnership trying to bring the approach their customers embraced to their new partner parent In 7 Unfortunately they could not for a another sense this was just cashing in and giving up the effort to complex set of reasons diffuse Finally the Trantex case definitely involved elements of the infra structure for breakthrough Inputs Trantex brought technology people and computer technology together with language people Architecture An architecture was created for people working together in incrementally improving centrally stored translations and for in tegrating with customers processes Breakthrough iterations The initiator s breakthrough group s break through and to some extent partner s breakthrough were described above Breakthrough cycles The initiator s breakthrough cycle was already described The group s breakthrough involved Kaija gathering a com Volume 10 Number 2 Winter 2001 27 CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad mitted team particularly involving technology people getting them to think about translation in a new way language people to embrace technology computer people to learn about
19. ly into an uncertain future Thus the Trantex employee shareholders decided to sell Within that same year nearly twenty local translation companies were bought by the big companies Curiously this consolidation eventually backfired on the big customers because the big translation companies reduced quality to reduce costs They were publicly listed and under pressure to increase their bottom lines in an people intensive industry which often translates to cost reductions which in this case resulted in reduction of quality Trantex and Models for Breakthrough In an investigation of a number of instances of breakthrough in business Shoji Shiba and David Walden Four over the past few years Shoji Shiba has observed Practical Revolutions in Management e a cycle for breakthrough Productivity Press Portland Oregon e three stages of breakthrough 2001 chapter 27 e an infrastructure for breakthrough 1 Commitment to Breakthrough 2 Mental Breakthrough _ N New Mental Chaos Model Figure 1 Breakthrough cycle 3 Technical Breakthrough Methods and Tools Figure 1 shows the cycle of breakthrough First a change leader dis covers a source of motivation for commitment to breakthrough Second a mental breakthrough is needed this typically begins with an unlearn ing step where previous conventional wisdom is discarded Third there is a realization step where the necessary tech
20. nical breakthroughs are achieved these technical breakthroughs can involve technology new Volume 10 Number 2 Winter 2001 25 CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad ways of looking at the market process changes etc These steps are repeated for successive breakthroughs 1 Initiator s breakthrough 2 Groups breakthrough Figure 2 Breakthrough stages V 3 Partner s breakthrough Figure 2 shows the three phases of breakthrough First the leader the initiator has his or her own breakthrough Second the initiator works to collect an appropriate team and provide an environment in which team members can embrace the breakthrough and make it their own Third there is activity to involve an appropriate partner or part ners for example potential customers in refining and diffusing the breakthrough Support from the top Drive process Give necessary resources and guidance Protective Barrier breakwater MILESTONES Breakthrough Iterations Human M resources _ l C So ano gt os Y cr f Figure 3 Breakthrough infrastructure l inputs M T Time te T lt L n Time Initiator s Group s Partner s Breakthrough Breakthrough Breakthrough ARCHITECTURE Learning opportunity from outside i Balancing values Figure 3 shows the infrastructure for breakthrough The thr
21. or Quality of Management Authors retain rights for re publication of their articles ISSN 1072 5296 Kaija P sti is a successful entrepre neur She established the software localization company Trantex grew it and eventually sold it She also established and developed Bitwit a training and new media design com pany Since selling Trantex in 1997 Ms P sti has been involved in the Finn ish high tech VC world In 1998 she became a partner in IT Venture De velopment a private VC fund in Finland She also has participated in various national programs on infor mation society and served on the board of the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation YLE Ms P ysti currently lives in Bos ton where she is a partner in Blue White Venture a consulting com pany that helps Finnish high tech companies enter the U S Market For several years Shoji Shiba has been researching methods of break through David Walden is the editor of this journal CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad Case Study of Trantex Described by Kaija P ysti to Shoji Shiba and David Walden Kaija P ysti founder of Trantex was interviewed in May 2001 by Shoji Shiba and David Walden Walden wrote up the Trantex case study based on the interview Over the next three months Walden and Shiba provided successive drafts to P ysti who in each case corrected errors and provided further detail Shiba and Walden then drafted the final section of this pap
22. tnotes references etc Text should include all the elements listed below Generally The CQM Journal follows the editorial principles of The Chicago Manual of Style We strongly prefer submissions in eletronic format for all text and as many of the figures as possible IBM based software particularly Microsoft Word for Windows is preferable to Macintosh based software if you have a choice but is by no means a requirement Please include 1 Title page stating the type of article e g 7 Step case study research paper short communication letter to the editor etc main title subtitle and authors full name s affiliation s and the address phone fax of the submitting author 2 All needed figures tables and photographs see below 3 Footnotes if appropriate numbered consecutively from the beginning to the end of the article 4 Reference list if appropriate Figures Tables and Photographs If you can insert each figure or table into the text where you would like it to fall Figures should be composed to conform to one of two widths 3 1 8 or 6 1 2 inches The maximum height for any figure is 9 3 8 inches Text within figures should not be smaller than 5 points and lines not less than 1 4 point at the figure s final size Figures should labeled with the figure number underneath and title on top Be sure that the text mentions each figure or table Please retain separate PICT or TIFF files of figures generate
23. translation Software translations required direct interaction with the computer files This sounds so obvious now but in the mid 1980s times were very different Then many translators had no computers so they could work only on printed material Trantex had some customers who could hardly believe that Trantex could really process files and even compile them changing as necessary local conventions such as decimal points date formats etc The software localization business was a major opportunity for Trantex Localizing software was not about translating the text it was about taking the English software and converting it into another lan guage including resizing the buttons changing selection letters etc It required understanding of local conventions and also the ability to com pile the translated files and to test that the translated version still worked Unfortunately there were very few tools at that time for all that work most of it had to be done manually The typical cycle for localizing a product such as Word for the U S from Microsoft into Word for Finland was as follows Some time after Another Trantex customer software development of the new version of Word was started at Microsoft an alpha or beta test version of the software became avail able At this point the software files were transmitted to Trantex At Trantex the software files for the new version were compared with the files for the previous version first man
24. ually and later using a tool called a translation memory Use of translation memory tools allowed building each translation effort on prior versions of the translation consistency across translators and documents and horizontal exchange of information Initially translation memories were available only for printed documents but in time they were made to work with both documents and software Translation memory tools were developed by a few companies including IBM and Trados A translation memory is a database in which a phrase by phrase translation from English to Finnish was maintained The translation memory supported the work of the human translators Volume 10 Number 2 Winter 2001 21 CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad The prior version of the English was stored in the translation memory along with its phrase by phrase translation into Finnish where each phrase had in effect been translated by a human translator The translation memory also had an algorithm for comparing the words in English from the new translation with the previous translation and finding differences This was done as a left to right match of strings it was not based on syntactic analysis When a 100 percent match was found for a phrase between the previous and new version the translation memory accepted the translation from the previous version as the translation for the new version When the match was less than 100 percent fuz
25. xt processing system targeted entirely for lay users so the software also had to be translated into Finnish That confirmed her thinking that more and more translations would be needed There fore she started looking for a few other customers Growth of the company Once the new company had five customers secured Kaija started hiring additional people who in the beginning worked only on an hourly ba sis to accommodate fluctuations in the volume of work and to keep fixed costs down The first four employees were from the University of Technology like Kaija herself and she corrected their style and gram mar However the fifth person was a Finnish language major some 20 years older than Kaija and a very important person for the company because she started training the techies how to write fluent text She also was a grown up which meant that they were no longer just a bunch of students but were beginning to develop as a company Another important characteristic of the company was that Kaija im mediately began to look for more customers although IBM could have kept their hands full easily However Kaija never wanted to be depen dent only on one customer First anything can happen no matter how good you are Second adding customers leveled the fluc tuations in IBM volumes Third they learned more than they would with only one customer Ina service business you need to become part of the customer and at the same
26. y At first Kaija just did a couple of translations as a way of making some money while studying Her first customer was a company importing basic computers and they did not pay much attention to quality Her second customer however was HP which paid much more attention to quality When she saw how pleased they were with the quality they received she understood computers and could write fluent Finnish she realized that there were not that many people doing what she did At that time Kaija states translators had no clue about computers and computer people wrote jargon incomprehensible to anyone else That had been fine before the PC because computers were used only by computer people who wanted to have everything in English anyway However with the PC the number of end users grew rapidly and they needed text that was Volume 10 Number 2 Winter 2001 19 CENTER FOR QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL Ad not jargon and was in their own language For HP Kaija worked on marketing materials which were targeted for end users and decision makers The amounts of text were still rather small Her next customer was a company that worked for IBM and through them she started working for IBM IBM also was very quality conscious and for them quality meant more than just good translations it included timely deliveries and reporting They also had much more material to be translated an entire piece of software IBM DisplayWriter a te
27. zy in localization nomenclature although that had nothing to do with fuzzy logic a human translator was shown the old and new versions of the English along with the old version of the Finnish for the phrase in question of course in the context of sentences and paragraphs Then the human translator changed the old translation appropriately Of course sometimes an entirely new phrase was found in the translation and for this a new translation was provided by the human translator Thus the translation memory greatly improved the efficiency with which a human translator could work by highlighting only those phrases that needed new translation work thus saving unnecessary and perhaps inconsistent retranslating of already translated phrases The translation memory was also a central database that could be accessed by multiple human translators working on different parts of the same localization project Thus it enabled new or updated translations of phrases to be shared by all human translators working on the project This provided increased efficiency and consistency from one translator to the next 4 This technology aided translation is Although translation memory tools could greatly improve the efficiency called Machined Aided Translation or and consistency of translations they could also spread incorrect MAT in distinction to Machine translations very quickly into the memory unless carefully administered Translation or MT w
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