“Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.”
–Walt Disney
Times are changing, and we’re changing with them…
Our clients’ industries are undergoing a period of rapid change – as is our language services industry, with AI offering new possibilities for customers, translators and project managers alike. Many Language Service Providers are evolving and adding new services to their roster in light of new technologies, opportunities and demands.
As a boutique agency, ecls translations is perfectly placed to anticipate our clients’ requirements and respond to the changing landscape in a dynamic and agile way, and we are continuing to launch new services.
Our work as translation professionals really is unrecognisable from just a few short years ago. See the below table for a summary of our newest services on offer and, more importantly, the range of benefits our clients enjoy.
Service | Benefits |
Technical writing | - Consistency of materials and thorough proofreading for elevated standards - Faster and better customer service for their end clients - Cost saving (greater efficiency and self-training materials to refer to) |
Creating software documentation | - Relieving engineers of a task they don’t enjoy so they can focus more on what’s important and where their strengths lie - Making text easy to understand for end users, increasing user acceptance and satisfaction |
Creative strategy & brand management | - Avoiding pitfalls through native-level understanding of the target culture and values - Building a solid reputation abroad - Winning new clients overseas |
Preparing training data sets for machine learning, feeding AI models with accurate input data | - Optimising output for faster, higher-quality translations - Increased sales - Lower cost |
Post-editing of generative AI copy | - Removing false, inaccurate or illogical results to avoid damage to reputation - Higher-quality translations where budget is limited - Boosted international sales |
“Rating” – assessing AI-generated sentences against one another, highlighting errors and assigning a quality score to help train the system | - Improved output for: - Better quality - Faster translations - Increased sales - Greater accessibility for multiple target audiences |
Transferable skills – technical writing
Our translators have a wealth of training and experience in critical skills including research, writing and adapting texts for our clients’ audiences, as well as subject matter expertise in the fields of technology, automotive and manufacturing. As a team, we are also always eager to seek out opportunities for development, training and growth to anticipate and respond to our clients’ ever-evolving needs.
When an opportunity recently arose to launch a new technical writing service, we jumped at the chance. There are countless affinities between technical translation and technical writing: both involve careful research, terminology management, and transforming sometimes complex information into clear and easily understandable text for target readers. For our client, we were able to use these well-honed skills to help create a knowledge base for customer service advisors at a company offering a corporate reward scheme. This involved absorbing and summarising a huge amount of information in an accessible way to ensure that call centre advisors can find the answers they need in an instant. This helped improve customer satisfaction and also contributed to a huge cost saving, as the knowledge base created has been designed for end customers too to reference and self-train on navigating the system and its multitude of features.
A further service we’re now offering in line with demand is the technical writing of software documentation. We’ve found this isn’t usually a well-loved task among software engineers, which is where our linguistic experts come in. We’re able to take complex concepts and ‘translate’ them into easy-to-understand language for target readers, contributing to greater ease of use and higher user acceptance (before any multilingual translation then comes into play).
Beyond marketing translation
As a team, we have decades of experience as marketing translators, and we are increasingly applying this industry-specific knowledge to other, related areas. This is in line with developments across the language services industry, where specialist marketing translators and agencies are using their industry insights and expertise to offer wider marketing-related services, including the following:
- Multilingual copywriting
- Multilingual SEO research and translation
- Digital marketing and campaign performance management
- Content testing and analysis
- International brand management
- Social media management
- Cultural consulting
- Website localisation and
- Creative strategy.
At ecls translations, we have begun working in several of these areas, including a recent creative strategy and international brand management project that involved using our cultural expertise to evaluate several slogans that our client was considering as part of their expansion to new country-specific markets. Such services are increasingly crucial in a world where getting it wrong can go viral – and not in a good way – costing companies a great deal in terms of both money and reputation. Getting it right, however, with a nuanced understanding of the culture and values of the target market, means setting yourself up for success when breaking into new territories, boosting international sales and winning new clients around the world.
New technologies breed new expertise
One of the biggest factors transforming the face of both the language services and marketing industries and beyond is the stratospheric rise of AI. This has created demand for new skills and services upstream and downstream of the AI output. For example, our team has worked on preparing training data sets for machine learning. This step is crucial to ensuring that AI models are fed with high-quality, accurate input data and thereby optimising their output from the start.
At the other end of the process, human post-editing of generative AI copy is also essential, and counters the risk of AI “hallucinations” – false, inaccurate or illogical results. For the past three years, we have been involved in the post-editing of keywords and Adwords for the world’s largest multi-national technology company, helping their end clients boost global sales. A more recent service we offer involves working as “raters”, which involves assessing AI-generated sentences against one another, highlighting errors and assigning a quality score to help train the system and ultimately improve output.
The outlook
Times are changing, and we’re changing with them. We’ve already been able to help countless clients rise to the challenge of internationalisation with our multifaceted localisation services, while new technologies allow us to streamline our processes and offer an even smoother, faster service for our customers as well as to cater for all types of deadline and budget.
We’re also excited to have joined the Magic Beans Tech Club in August 2024, which brings together representatives from Language Service Providers around the world with the aim of knowledge exchange, sharing best practice and working to stay at the cutting edge of technology to better serve our customers now and in the years to come.
