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Seven Tips for Better Translation Results

Whether you are using SYSTRAN’s Desktop, Enterprise Server, SaaS or online software, one question our IT Support is asked all the time is “How Can I Improve My Translation Output?” If incorrect or incomplete text or data is input into Machine Translation software, (also known as “garbage in, garbage out”) the outcome will, more often than not, also be incorrect or incomplete.

F.A.Q photo with tagline "How can i impove my translation output?" - SYSTRAN is showing ways to make better translation.

Here are seven tips to a better result:

  1. Use complete, grammatical sentences – Sentences should always start with a capital letter and end in either a period, exclamation point or question mark. A complete sentence always contains a verb, expresses an idea and makes sense standing alone.
  1. Avoid the passive voice – The passive voice is used to show interest in the person or object that experiences an action rather than the person or object that performs the action.
  1. Punctuation is important; clauses will translate best if separated by commas – Punctuation is the feature of writing that gives meaning to the written word. An error in punctuation can convey a completely different meaning to the one that is intended.
  1. Try to use simple, declarative sentences – A declarative sentence makes a statement, is in a present tense, and ends in a period. These are the most common sentences in the English language. It can either be a simple or compound sentence.
  1. Avoid ambiguity – To avoid ambiguity keep your sentences short, start with the subject, then the verb and end with the object. Use words and tenses consistently throughout.
  1. Avoid abbreviations, acronyms, jargon and colloquialisms – An abbreviation or acronym should first be spelled out if there are to be used consistently in a document. Colloquialisms are informal forms of speech and should be used mainly for speaking and not writing. Abbreviations, acronyms and jargon can be added to your User Dictionary or Translation Memories.
  1. Use your Dictionary Manager – SYSTRAN software includes a feature called the Dictionary Manager, which allows you to create your own dictionaries to supplement or override the main dictionary that comes with the program.  Using this feature can make substantial improvements to the translation.

The accuracy of the translation varies with the input.  If the input text is grammatically correct and unambiguous, it should translate well enough to convey the gist of what’s been written.

By: Ashley Shuler, Technical Support Analyst and Brooke Palm, Director of Customer Care SYSTRAN Software, Inc.


Picture and quote of Jean Senellart, Global CTO of SYSTRAN. Talks about AI, data and technology.

[This article originally appeared on Kirti Vashee’s Blog]





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SYSTRAN at the Digital Forensics and Analysis Summit

Officiel Poster of SYSTAN and its partner Relativity at Digital Summit on October 16th-17th. Showing a woman in a Department of security controlOn October 16-17th, SYSTRAN and its partner Relativity will be participating in the Digital Forensics & Analysis Summit as sponsors and exhibitors. The Digital Forensics & Analysis Summit is a two-day forum that will gather international experts from around the world in Abu Dhabi to share best practices on how technology is used in their forensics department to extract evidence that is able to stand up in trial.

Since information governance, forensics and eDiscovery procedures face mounting pressure from the growth of Electronic stored Information, legal standards and rules governing digital investigation requirements have also contributed to the rise in litigation and associated legal costs.

Within this environment, documents written in languages other than English, including data collection, processing and reviewing can pose major challenges, especially when ensuring the mandatory confidentiality of those procedures, as these typically forbid online translation. Organizations need to search by keyword and find relevant documents and emails in the appropriate languages while controlling costs and maximizing productivity. Therefore time-intensive human translation is usually not an option and the need for viable machine translation solutions becomes all the more apparent.

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How Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is Creating a Global Post-Language Economy

This article was originally published in The Next Web. How Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is Creating a Global Post-Language Economy.

A man is holding a tablet and reading something - Neural Machine Translation

Businesses are same all over the world. People work hard to make their products sell, their companies grow and broaden their futures. But while business may be universally understood, the languages we conduct it in are not. One of the exciting recent developments in technology by Google has the potential to change the face of business as we know it. It is known as Neural Machine Translation (NMT), and it promises to break down language barriers to a degree we have never seen before.

“The Internet created a global economy, but there are still numerous friction points, chief among them a substantial language barrier,” says Denis Gachot, CEO of SYSTRAN Software Inc., a language technology company. “NMT is a scalable solution to the language barrier problem that can achieve numerous outcomes – allow businesses to rapidly transmit large volumes of documents in different languages, connect small businesses to the global economy that could not operate without professional translation, and even empower consumers to find products and services they couldn’t have before.”

How is it different from Rule-based and Phrase-based translation models?

Neural Machine Translation is the shift from rule-based and phrase-based translation models, which translates word-by-word or in groups of words between languages. Instead, NMT translates entire sentences at a time, looking to discern cultural, colloquial, and technical contexts to create more accurate translations. The technology mirrors human intuition in its ability to pick up on subtleties, but because it is a machine, it can process these faster than we can.

Let’s take an example of an official note that says: パリに出張の時に私はCEOに会いました.

With a phrase-based machine translation (PBMT), you would receive the translated output as: ‘I met Paris in the CEO trip doing business.’ With Neural Machine Translation (NMT), you will get: ‘I met the CEO when I was in Paris on a business trip.’

In Japanese, main verbs are always used at the end, so to make sense of the used phrases within it, you need to reference the end of a sentence.

NMT is also an end-to-end learning system, which means that it gets better the longer it is in use. This deep learning function powers its neural network, which computes translations with such a degree of complexity that often times even its developers are unsure how it arrived at its conclusion. It is, in a sense, very much like the human mind.

The beauty in all this is the ease to conduct international business now. Caring for clients, clarifying concerns with business partners, or trying to reach new markets is possible with the click of a button. All those written communications that would once have required a linguist can be translated with a comparable degree of accuracy using NMT, making business as usual, unusually uncomplicated.

So how should we anticipate seeing the effects of NMT?

Firstly, NMT allows small businesses to bring their product to the global market, and with them, their increasingly high standards for innovative, quality products. If a businesswoman in Poland wants to sell to clients in Japan, she can do so without having to spend weeks laboring over miscommunications and misunderstandings in emails written and read in second languages. This will increase the diversity of products and services available, while also speeding the pace of innovation.

Large corporations are already benefiting from this technology. Google’s launch of NMT technology operates in eight of the world’s major languages, covering 30 percent of the world’s population. SYSTRAN’s PNMT facilitates communications in 70 different language pairs.

An influx of both quality and quantity in products and producers will inevitably boost the current of globalization and its roaring marketplace. Language, which was originally a tool for organizing mankind, has in recent times become a barrier. This new wave of advancements in NMT may be just the crossing over point the global market has been looking for but it is more than ready to bridge that language barrier very soon.

SYSTRAN’s team is setting private meetings for an exclusive view of the PNMT concept. For more information, contact Craig Stern at craig.stern@systrangroup.com and to set up a meeting, click here.

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This article was originally published in Entrepreneur Magazine. illustration of a globe and the word "hello" translated into different languages. Translation Tech is the key


Behind-the-scenes technology is not usually the sexy stuff that makes big headlines. Unless you are the IT guy in the back room, this kind of difficult-to-explain stuff is not the leading topic of discussion at your dinner party. Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is different. Few things on the horizon currently have as much importance or as much appeal. What it does behind the scenes changes the face of the whole economy.

In short, NMT is a deep learning technology that translates within context, not just one word at a time. Recent advancements have made this approach nearly fluent, making previous iterations of machine translation irrelevant overnight. The usual language translation heavyweights, Google and SYSTRAN, are pioneering this technology and making it available to different segments of the market.

So what does this have to do with business? In short, everything. Here are four ways NMT will impact the market.

1. Small businesses with global reach. 

Small businesses are the driving force of the U.S. economy. According to the Small Business Administration, these companies employ 99.7 percent of America’s workforce. Their impact on the economy is far ranging, from innovative products to essential services. But they are also limited in reach, typically restricted by small operational budgets. That means they don’t frequently sell to international markets, and especially not to foreign language economies.

“After the internet arrived, we started hearing the term ‘global economy,’” says Denis Gachot, CEO at SYSTRAN. “It implies an ability to communicate, connect and transact with anyone in the world. But most don’t have that ability because, despite the internet removing geographic barriers, there is still very much a communication barrier in language.”

A large corporation can hire multilingual professionals to run remote offices and provide customer service in numerous languages. That is a luxury most small businesses cannot afford. NMT allows these businesses to immediately translate their web pages and online communications into more than 100 languages. “Neural Machine Translation is going to change the economy by giving more businesses a language capability they can use to communicate and understand in real time,” says Gachot.

That means that the shop owner in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, can market her products to people in Germany, Japan, Brazil and dozens of other countries.

A woman is holding a tablet and translate something into Korean. Neural connection is above the image. Translation Tech is the key

2. Automatic translation of thousands of documents.

But NMT is not just an opportunity for growth for small business. Larger corporations stand to benefit from the quick processing capabilities of NMT as well. Company documents can quickly be translated into multiple languages with reliable accuracy and precision.

Previously, that kind of work would have required a team of highly skilled linguists and would have taken weeks to translate the original and check the resulting copy. But NMT changes that. The open network set-up of NMT technology allows for “soft alignment,” which means the system can search for the context of phrases and sentences instead of translating word by word. The reliability of this kind of machine translation, and the speed in which it is accomplished, can dramatically change the way companies are able to operate and ultimately serve their clientele all over the world.

3. Radically changes specific industries. 

A change in translation technology means a huge change in specific industries. For example, legal eDiscovery can be extremely complicated for legal teams trying to access emails, chats and online communications in other languages. Each communication has to be carefully assessed for meaning and intent within the context of colloquial uses of the language and varying forms of slang. This is a nightmarish recipe for anyone working on such a case.

NMT changes this by rapidly learning terminology nuances and then producing high-quality translations at a fraction of the time it takes a human team to do the same work.

By using our own brain as a model, this technology is able to apply human intuition at machine speed. “Techniques for understanding slang include custom dictionaries and custom translation engines,” Gachot explains. “These engines are trained from hundreds of thousands of pieces of human translated content and are able to mimic the fluidity of expressions found in those human translations, including when there is colloquialism involved. We also have custom dictionaries for Information Technology (IT), economics, tourism, dialog and so on.”

A woman is holding a tablet on a plane. Translation Tech is the key

4. Opens up isolated areas to the global market.

With the expansion of small businesses in global trade and more accessibility to unique products from a greater range of places, previously unreachable geographical markets will open up.

Right now, many countries are left out of the global marketplace because small businesses have no way of marketing to them or handling transactions across language barriers. Consumers in emerging markets may be the first to see the impact, but more remote countries will feel the effects soon after. Online marketplaces like Etsy and Zazzle can make language translation automatic, allowing users to conduct business in their own language. This reduces the friction in global commerce and increases the opportunities that remote consumers have to products and services around the world.

Business owners in remote corners of the world will now have a grander stage for their products, larger companies will be able to better care for their clients, and service industries will evolve to meet the changing tides. That is a complex technology worth talking about at your dinner party.


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This article was originally published in Entrepreneur Magazine. This New Translation Tech Will Smash the Language Barrier to Doing Business Globally.

What Does the Post-Language Economy Look Like

This article was originally published on Inc. What Does the Post-Language Economy Look Like.

A woman is profiled with open mouth and letters come out of her mouth - Post-Language Economy Look Like

CREDIT: Getty Images

How translation technology is changing the face of small business on a global scale.

The greatest barrier to global trade is not space and time, or even geopolitics. The greatest barrier today is language. Only major corporations have been able to set up mirror offices and global operations networks to facilitate international trade. Human translators, an expensive resource, act as bridges between producers and consumers or business partners who speak different languages. But this is an imperfect solution to a significant challenge. Very few people are fluent, or even competent, in more than a handful of languages, making it difficult for companies to do business in more than a handful of countries.

Much of the world’s economy is comprised of small businesses that do not have the resources to overcome dozens of language barriers in countries all over the world. But if small businesses could overcome the language barrier, what would the global market look like? Where would we be if the ‘mom and pop’ stores that fuel our local economies were able to join the global market?

“There is a wealth of potential in start-ups and entrepreneurial businesses all around the world,” says Denis Gachot, CEO of Systran Group. “One of the biggest obstacles to harnessing that potential is the language barrier. Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is working to bring that wall down.”

Neural Machine Translation

A natural step in the progression of communication technologies, NMT is a tool that connects people who would otherwise have no means to understand one another. The technology is aimed at translating large volumes of business communications almost instantly and with more effectiveness than human operators.

Unlike preceding translation technologies, NMT builds a neural center of information that can be tuned for more apt translations. The network approach sidesteps the bottleneck often seen in translation technology that hinders the improvement of encoder-decoder systems. This “soft-alignment” is a reflection of our own intuition, so these language translations done by a machine are more human than ever. “This technology is of a caliber that deserves the attention of everyone in the field,” says Gachot. “It can translate at near-human levels of accuracy and can translate massive volumes of information exponentially faster than we can operate.”

NMT is an end-to-end learning system, so it learns and corrects itself through continued use. Picking up patterns in languages for more accurate translations, NMT systems will continue to improve with time and application, making them the ideal employee.

But part of the beauty of this system is that it is a scalable technology and capable of processing volumes of information exponentially faster than humans are able to. This makes NMT an affordable option for small businesses looking to take their products into more markets. Doors previously closed because of the language barrier are now swinging open. And the world is changing for it.

Companies Using NMT as Plugin

The last year has seen huge leaps in NMT technology. While it remains a tool predominantly for larger businesses, NMT is proving its salt as a revolutionary force in the international market. In September, Google researchers announced their version for this technology, which translates entire sentences instead of just single words, providing a more authentic and relevant translation. Currently, it functions in eight major world languages, able to service some 35 percent of the earth’s population.

Already, NMT is being used in clouds and network plugins. Facebook announced in March of last year that they would be using neural networks for their own page translations.

But most exciting in this progression of NMT is its ability to change the way small businesses have been able to contribute to the global market. Google and Systran are racing to roll out NMT in new languages, already delivering dozens of language pairs. The linguistic technology now facilitates communication in 130 different languages, providing real solutions for internal collaboration, online customer support and eDiscovery in multilingual contexts.

What this means practically is that an online store owner in St. Petersburg, Russia is now able to reach a customer in Montevideo, Uruguay and market and discuss her product with reliable translation technology as the go-between.

Economic Outcomes

Small businesses are key to economic strength. Properly equipped with tools and resources, they have the power to grow and shape economies at any scale. Smarter regulations and tax structures are not the only factors at play here. These businesses need to be able to pursue consumers wherever they may be.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), 99.7 percent of all employer firms are small businesses. They have generated 64 percent of new jobs, and paid 44 percent of the total United States private payroll in the last 20 years. The prospect of enabling these small businesses to broaden their customer base and compete in the global market is more than exciting; it is world-changing.

Gachot adds, “For many years, we have tried to deal with language as if it was a barrier for communication – while with neural machine translation, language difference is what makes the richness of communication between different cultures.”

NMT looks to be the pivoting step for global trade. With the language wall crumbling, more small businesses will be able to bring their unique, quality-crafted products and services onto the international market scene, which is good for everyone.


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Digital platforms and the post-language economy

This article was originally published on ITProPortal Digital platforms and the post-language economy by Denis Gachot.

Gold mic is shining into the darkness waiting someone voice - SYSTRAN vision of Post-Language Economy in Digital platforms

The world can get even smaller, and new technology is making that happen.

When we imagine international companies, we think large, publicly traded conglomerates that have substantial resources and funds to facilitate operations on opposite ends of the globe. But that is changing.

Already the Internet has shrunk the world so that small companies now rely on software engineers in Pakistan and marketing agencies contract with graphic designers in the Philippines. But the world can get even smaller, and new technology is making that happen.

Today, the new frontier is language. Individuals have a plethora of platforms that allow them to access consumers all over the globe and work with other companies in faraway places – if only they could speak the same language. In an ironic twist, language has turned from something that first facilitated human cooperation and growth, to something that currently impedes our ability to work together.

Technology may finally be ready to abolish that barrier forever. It is somewhat remarkable that in 2017, more than 20 years after widespread use of the Internet began, we still rely almost exclusively on humans to translate language in commercial formats. But translation bears all of the earmarks of those functions that artificial intelligence ought to be capable of replicating, and a technology called Neural Machine Translation (NMT) does just that.

Contextual translation ability

By leveraging its contextual translation ability alongside its deep learning functions, NMT has achieved historic results in the journey to a post-language economy. In a side-by-side comparison with human translators, in a technical domain translation for English-Korean, SYSTRAN’s NMT translations were preferred 41 per cent of the time. That success is achieved by advancing language translation beyond rule-based translation methods.

Before NMT, machine translation models – known as rules-based or ‘phrase-based’ – were only able to reference five to seven words at a time when determining meaning. Each language pair has its own linguistic challenges, but it made the translation for certain languages, like Japanese, more challenging because you need to know the entire sentence to put all of the words into context.

Let’s say a colleague forwards you an urgent email, and it includes this sentence: パリに出張の時に私はCEOに会いました.

With a phrase-based machine translation, you would receive this output: ‘I met Paris in the CEO trip doing business.’ With NMT, you would get: ‘I met the CEO when I was in Paris on a business trip.’

In Japanese, main verbs are placed at the end, so you need to reference the end of a sentence to make sense of the phrases within it. NMT processes the entire sentence (and soon paragraph) from end-to-end without intermediate stages.

That is why context is so important. The effect of machine translation being able to better understand context results in a huge jump in BLEU score (the industry measurement for accuracy). SYSTRAN’s Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT) program has seen increases in all 61 language pairs and where we see the biggest increase is in Asian languages. For some languages, we saw a jump of 200 per cent in BLEU score.


With machine translation, we have a metric called ‘Gisting,’ as in ‘you get the gist.’ In addition to this metric, we test whether or not a user can solve their problem with the translated output. Were they able to search a FAQ and customise a piece of software with the answer? Were they able to search a digital database of products and images and find what they were looking to purchase? If yes, then they got the gist.

“Gisting requires extensive post-editing. NMT has moved us into fluency. What fluency allows is the ability to read and understand so that you no longer need to post edit,” says Ken Behan, V.P. of Sales and Marketing. NMT is allowing us to focus on ‘meaning’ and ‘fluency’ scores. With fluency, we ask if the translation sounds like a native speaker wrote it. With fluency and meaning, we can ask:

Were they able to understand a review and make an educated decision? Were they able to read the manual specs and assemble a piece of heavy machinery? Were they able to find a product, read the description and purchase what they were expecting?

Refer to the English translations above. With the first sentence, did you get the gist? Yes! You could infer someone went to Paris on something business related.

With the second, did you understand the meaning and the fluency? Yes, you can understand what kind of trip it was and what happened.

New solutions

Neural Machine Translation will further advance traditional MT solutions and create new ones in communication, customer support, e-Learning, eDiscovery, compliance and user-generated content to name a few. Also, early-adopting linguists using NMT are already increasing their productivity.

Similar to the human brain, the neural machine translator learns through a process in which the machine receives a series of stimuli over several weeks. This development, based on complex algorithms at the forefront of Deep Learning, enables the PNMT engine to learn, generalise the rules of a language from a given translated text, and produce a translation close to human levels of competency.


The difference between previous language technologies and what NMT can do today is remarkable, and business leaders should take note. Just ask yourself who you would want to do business with: the guy that says, “I met Paris in the CEO trip doing business,” or the one that says, “I met the CEO when I was in Paris on a business trip.”


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SYSTRAN’s Continuing Neural MT Evolution

by Kirti Vashee on eMpTy Pages, a blog about translation technology, localization and collaboration

A man touches a brain's connection network. It shows Neural MT Evolution



Ongoing Enhancements of the PNMT Product Offering


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