One of the main objectives of Cogen's language technology is to reduce translation project costs and turnaround times. Other significant benefits include enhanced translation quality and consistency.
An obvious way to do this is to reduce the volume of content that needs to be translated. Cogen's process team can help here, by showing you how to create optimum original documents which will translate more readily, and more economically.
Our "content strip out" tool is a great help here, too. This unique application eliminates, from the content that will be sent to translators and reviewers, any elements that do not need to be translated (for example, figures, measurements, names and other specialist terminology you have identified). This is stored in a control file that will be applied to the strip out routine.
This time-saving application also eliminates content repetition across all of the files being sent for translation as part of a single project. This may include chapter headings, warnings and the like, which may be repeated multiple times. A single translation of these elements will be applied to all of the areas affected.
The strip out tool can filter out the content from any format, too - whether from print publishing, e-publishing or from a content management editor - and stores it in a collection of content segments, ready to be aligned with their translations after cross-reference with your translation memory.
Translation memories are a translation industry standard, enabling previously translated content to be re-used wherever applicable.
Cogen's translation memory application, created and maintained by in-house developers, uses the Levenshtein algorithm to measure content deviation and distinguish between exact and fuzzy matches (when 60% of the content matches), and new content.
Each content segment stored in a customer's designated translation memory has unambiguous identification (metatags) of origin (the reference of your publication), of date and of status (reviewed or not).
This allows you to access and drill down into metrics about levels of content re-use.
If these metrics show room for improvement, the findings can be used to encourage more efficient content creation by your technical authors.
Your own unique translation memory is available to be viewed, securely, at my.cogen.com. Access authorisation is limited to the duration of the project for translators and reviewers, but is unlimited for customer contacts.
Terminology management is THE tool for ensuring translation quality. Surveys clearly indicate that over 90% of translation quality issues - which in turn result in a lack of clarity of product information - stem from terminology inconsistency.
Cogen's Terminology Management application highlights, in the file that will be sent to translators and reviewers, each occurrence of a term or expression contained in your glossary. It also shows the translation of the glossary.
It uses a glossary provided by you, and completed by Cogen's linguists, to include all inflected forms of each term, making the tool 100% foolproof.
It can also extract a glossary from your existing documents, based on the frequency of term usage in source and target languages.