Milengo combines acrolinx, Asia Online, Clay Tablet for End-To-End Translation and Localization Solution

Berlin, Boston, Singapore, Toronto – August 2, 2010 – Milengo, a worldwide language service provider (LSP), has engaged a trio of specialized translation services and technology providers to create an end-to-end translation solution that delivers on the promise of the next generation of translation advances. The new offering combines quality-optimization, workflow management and automated machine-translation with human translation and editing skills to not only increase efficiency, but to also open new markets that were previously not possible with a human only approach.

With the growth in globalization, many new opportunities have become available to enterprises. However barriers remained in terms of cost and efficiencies that prohibited access. Milengo saw an opportunity to leverage recent innovations in technology and translation process management to allow it to expand its capacity and meet market growth, all while constraining its expenses and staff.

“The translation business is poised for a major transformation,” said Renato Beninatto, CEO of Milengo. “As a global provider of translation services, there are more opportunities than ever. However, scaling up to meet the growth is a challenge. We believe service providers need to reassess their business models, business practices and tools in order to survive the increasing demands of clients.”

According to Mr. Beninatto, the demands can be broken into three discrete domains: manageability, to cope with the increase volume of work; effectiveness, to ensure better quality; and efficiency, to reduce costs. In order to address these three domains of business improvement, Milengo brought together three leaders in their respective fields:  Clay Tablet, acrolinx, and Asia Online.

“Rapid globalization has led to an explosion in information, so much so that not all can be localized by humans alone due to cost and time constraints. The vast offerings in knowledge and content available in languages such as English have taken years to produce. Working at the foundations of the content to ensure quality and then combining process and integration with machine and human translation skills is a logical evolutionary step and ultimately creates even more jobs in the industry.” said Gregory Binger, Chairman, Asia Online.

Clay Tablet will provide a comprehensive infrastructure for integration into translation project and content management workflow. Using Clay Tablet, Milengo customers can commission projects, quote, rout and monitor the status of specific translation tasks, and manage documents throughout the entire translation life-cycle. Clay Tablet was selected as it is widely considered the most open, most interconnected platform of its kind in the world.

acrolinx will ensure that source documents are of sufficient quality to be translated. A chief cause of poorly translated documents is poor source documents. By leveraging acrolinx’s services and managing the process automatically through the Clay Tablet infrastructure into the Asia Online machine translation engines, Milengo has been able to demonstrate a significantly higher quality output.

Asia Online provides a state-of-the-art, customizable automated machine translation platform.  Milengo utilizes this platform seamlessly through the Clay Tablet infrastructure to create first pass (raw), near-human level translations. These raw translations are then automatically routed to the appropriate human post-editors that use Asia Online’s integrated post-editing suite to not only ensure final document quality, but to also provide feedback into the Asia Online translation engine, ensuring continual quality improvement. By leaving the bulk of translation to the automated systems, and allowing human translators to focus on the nuances of translation, Milengo is able to both increase its capacity and reduce overall costs, further enabling even more translation.

“While there are some vendors that claim they can deliver a start-to-finish solution for translation, the truth is that all are missing essential aspects that limit future growth,” said Mr. Beninatto.  “We decided to look for the best of breed offerings – those that not only provided excellence in their field, but also those that were based on open standards.  Because they are standards-based, Clay Tablet, acrolinx and Asia Online all work together seamlessly.”

How the Solution Evolved

Milengo had been increasingly involved in bulk translation projects stemming from Internet-based services, such as technical support help-desks and knowledge management systems. These types of projects frequently involved public documents and comments and there was as pressing need to make this information available in multiple languages.

In order to cope with the ever increasing volume of documents from these projects, Milengo embarked on a Machine Translation pilot project to translate content generated by the public and send it to support staff.  Using Asia Online’s automated machine translation platform, public questions were translated from a subset of languages into English, and the support articles and FAQs were translated from English into six languages.

Asia Online worked with Milengo to develop a customized engine that was optimized to handle the complexities of both technical information, and also the less formal structure of public questions.

During this pilot, Milengo and Asia Online identified that the quality of source documents had a big impact on the resulting translation quality.  An experiment was conducted where source documents were processed by acrolinx. The resulting improvements in raw machine translation were so positive, that this source document quality control was adopted for all projects, not just those involving public sources of information.

In order to automate and manage the entire translation process, Clay Tablet provided a connector that allowed the client’s website content to be automatically passed to acrolinx, then to Asia Online for automated translation, and then into post-editing by Milengo’s global pool of translators.  Most importantly, post-editing information is captured and returned back into the machine translation platform to improve quality.

Key findings

• Customize automated machine translation engines to the client’s domains and engage in a continual and well-integrated improvement cycle. As time goes on, the machine translation engine becomes increasingly accurate.
• Address document quality issues early in the translation process to maximize efficiency of the machine translation / human post-editing phase.
• Only adopt solutions that support open standards to ensure that all services and products can integrate seamlessly.
• Streamline the project management of translation to eliminate as much manual human labor as possible, especially with regards to managing documents.
• Choose best of breed solutions and understand how they work together.

About acrolinx (www.acrolinx.com)

acrolinx is the world’s leading provider of Information Quality Management solutions. More than 60 blue-chip customers worldwide, such as Cisco, IBM, Siemens, Philips, an d Caterpillar, rely on acrolinx in their information development process. The flagship product acrolinx IQ™ has rapidly become the leading quality management solution for high-value content. Its competitive edge is the award-winning linguistic technology. See www.acrolinx.com for more information.

About Asia Online (www.asiaonline.net  / www.languagestudio.com)

Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore, and it has significant operations in Bangkok, Thailand, with R&D activities throughout Asia and expanding sales operations in Europe and North America.

Asia Online has developed technology that enables near-human quality mass translation of text across more than 500 language pairs. The technology is currently being deployed to assist enterprises and language service providers translate large amounts of information into their preferred languages and translate millions of pages of open content into local languages absolutely free to help eliminate information poverty in countries which are under served by such content.

About Clay Tablet Technologies (www.Clay-Tablet.com)

Clay Tablet Technologies’ unique translation integration software, Clay Tablet 2.5, easily connects any number of content management systems to any translation system or provider.

Clients immediately benefit from Clay Tablet 2.5 with improved translation process efficiency, making it significantly faster and easier to set up, manage, send and retrieve translation projects.

Based in Toronto, Canada, Clay Tablet works exclusively with a global channel partner network of technology vendors, translation service providers and system integrators.

About Milengo (www.milengo.com)

Milengo delivers translation and related localization services to the world’s most successful, international businesses. Its team of over 350 in-house translators, project managers, engineers and more work alongside clients from 19 offices located across the Americas, Europe and Asia.