Localization Today

Multimedia post-production offers various ways to reach your audience. The most popular of these include dubbing, voiceovers, and subtitling. Each method has its own benefits and drawbacks, so it’s important for a company to evaluate all pros and cons in order to choose the right one for its goal.

For as long as Denis Ivanov could remember, his localization team worked with Google Sheets. Everyone was comfortable and familiar with it. But at some point, the thought popped into their heads that there must be something better. When they went searching, they discovered Gridly, a localization platform. 

As the pandemic from which we are painstakingly emerging has taught us, making correct scientific information available to the public is not only a question of professional ethics for those who work in communication, but also a question of public safety.

One can easily imagine a small LSP where there is no separate vendor management function — likely project managers perform this role. Ultimately, it is the PM who is responsible for all key aspects of a project — budget, time, and resources. But mature providers have a dedicated team of vendor managers, who take over much of the PM responsibilities.

Having such committed partners is the first step in being able to provide clients with high-quality translations in low-resource languages. The Akorbi team is delighted to be at least a small part of the ongoing effort to keep Hawaiian growing and evolving, as they also do with languages like Ilocano and Samoan. In the story of this collaboration, one can find a real-life example of how language services providers can have an impact on the status of endangered languages.

This month in The Lab, Mark Shriner looks at trends in the delivery of interpretation services in healthcare. Specifically, drivers of the growth in this space and a few of the key attributes of the technology that supports the delivery of interpretation services. 

A company as massive as Dell Technologies has no shortage of need for translation and localization services. And Wayne Bourland, director of translation, is the man heading up that operation. Though he didn’t originally envision a career in language service, his career took him in an unexpected direction, and now he oversees the translation of words by the millions or even billions. 

What happens when the translation of a book comes out before the original text? That’s what happened earlier this month with Prince Harry’s memoir — albeit, inadvertently so. The Spanish translation of his book Spare went on sale nearly a week before its official release date on Jan. 10, prompting some premature media coverage of the book’s contents in the Anglosphere. 

On Jan. 24, KUDO held a launch event announcing its forthcoming artificial intelligence (AI)-powered speech-to-speech translation tool, KUDO AI.

Generative AI tools have arrived, quite loudly, onto center stage, and in my opinion, this is not just part of another tech hype cycle. Rather, they deserve our eager applause.