Translation
Without doubt one of the cornerstones of Alpha's success over the last 22 years has been the consistently high standard of our translation service, which we deliver at the most competitive value for money in the industry.
Our translators are all native speakers of the respective target languages. Junior staff have a Bachelor's degree, with a postgraduate translation qualification, and their work is supervised and checked by a Senior translator. These Senior translators have a Master's degree or PhD, and a minimum of five years' relevant industry experience. Questions and problems are always being discussed within the team and sometimes even with colleagues in other language teams. The friendly yet professional team spirit is one of the big assets of our in-house model. We can scale language teams to any size by adding external suppliers in our 5 specialist areas. These are all carefully vetted and have similar qualifications. Our in-house language-leads guarantee consistency and quality on all projects.
We use translation memory tools to recycle translations efficiently and to ensure consistency of terminology and style. This reduces the translation effort and lowers costs when new versions of the product are translated. It is important to remember, however, that using translation memories is not the same as using automatic or machine translation. Human input and good judgement are still required, and the memory databases need to be managed with care. Our standard translator workstation is based on a wide range of CAT tools including Trados Studio, the market-leading translation memory package.
While we do not use automated translation ourselves, a number of our clients have decided to generate large volumes of documentation using a fully automated process. Our machine translation reviewers then assist them to get this output into a user-friendly and comprehensible form.
In some industries, especially automotive, great progress has been made, as their technical authors use 'controlled language', making it easier for the machine to generate acceptable output which needs little post-editing. In other environments, where texts tend to be more varied and authors write in a more casual style, this is proving more problematic.
