Translation tool reduces words, costs

By RICHARD PAMATATAU

Auckland's AuthorIT Software Corporation is hunting down multilingual business for its language translation tool built with help from Technology New Zealand.

The $250,000 grant from the Technology for Business Growth scheme was used to develop AuthorIT's localisation manager, a new tool that makes it faster and cheaper to get information to different cultures in different languages.

Managing director Paul Trotter said the technology had been designed to track and manage translation and localisation of source content into any single or double-byte language but did not manage grammar.

"No computer is able to do that yet."

The product contained a number of "smarts" allowing it to know what content was translatable, what had been previously translated, was reused or had been added or changed, he said, meaning only content that actually required translation was sent to translators.

"You get things done quicker and smarter this way."

A pilot study with Coca-Cola showed a word reduction of 31.5 per cent in new translations, resulting in a direct saving of more than US$75,000 ($115,000) for translation into just one language.

Localisation manager unites existing localisation and translation processes and exports text to XML, a language that works across a number of systems, in a neutral format, increasing accuracy by eliminating the effects of formatting.