Demand For One Hour Translation’s First-Of-A-Kind Hybrid Online Service Shakes Up The Market
The world of online translation is changing rapidly as a result of the growing penetration of Neutral Machine Translation (NMT) engines. One Hour Translation (OHT) is at the forefront of these changes being the first fully hybrid online translation service. To provide customers with the best product, OHT has partnered with the biggest names in the business: Amazon, Google, DeepL, Bing and other existing NMT engines that form the backbone of this rapidly expanding trend in the translation field.
“We have integrated the engines of all major players with our own translation management system, and now offer a full-fledged hybrid translation process capable of handling hundreds of thousands of projects a week,” says Ofer Shoshan, CEO of OHT, the world’s largest online translation agency. He predicts that at the current rate of development NMT will drastically change the human-based translation industry within one to three years and account for 50% of the $40 billion market. That would impact over 600,000 language professionals and 21,000 service providers currently in the global industry.
OHT offers an end-to-end enterprise solution. Each project is analysed quickly to decide which NMT engine is most suitable for use. To speed up the process the company has invested a lot of resources including the building of a dedicated engineering team, to create several types of hybrid and NMT-related services. These range from the OHT’s NMT Evaluation Score, hybrid translation, NMT training and rating and other related services.
Key to the process is OHT’s evaluation score, which is the first accurate measure of NMT translation quality and is published quarterly. The company’s evaluation score highlights the huge advances and contribution NMT has made in providing human or near-human translation quality. It is free of charge and is a service to the industry.
Projects go through pre-processing to prepare them for translation. The next stage involves the marking of translation memory matches and the most suitable NMT engine or engines are chosen to provide the most accurate translation. Once completed projects then proceed to the human post-editing stage where a decision is made about the need for the fine-tuning of the material. This is followed by quality control, post-processing and when completed delivery to the customer.
OHT has perfected the hybrid flow, and the company is currently processing hundreds of thousands of projects a month for enterprise customers. The complexity of the process requires more than NMT engines and OHT is the only service that meets the additional needs for providing true high-quality translation.
Ofer Shoshan, CEO of OHT: “Using our services and technology, global companies can localise massive amounts of content quickly while maintaining high quality. We’re excited about the initial results we’ve seen with Amazon Translate on a translation project we ran for our customer, iHerb. We were able to deliver human quality at a much lower cost than human only translation. And we did it 67% faster than human only translation. Thanks to our Hybrid translation system we are able to offer human quality cheaper and faster.”
In addition to providing hybrid translation to customers on a very large scale, OHT helps NMT engine vendors with the training, testing, rating and the improving of their engines. OHT excels particularly in low-resource languages, those languages with insufficient or easily available materials for training NMT engines. OHT supports around 100 languages, including some less commonly used languages.