services
We have been providing localization & translation services and additional language services related to adapting products to the global market since 1993
our core services
Translation Areas: The Main Focus –
IT & Technology / Medical / Legal
Thanks to valuable long-term relationships with our vendors and partners, exe has been able to build a smooth-running multilingual translation engine. Via this engine, and founded on the longstanding collaboration of partners in exe’s translation network we have long provided strong expertise in numerous areas for many languages.
Key Domains
IT
exe has kept IT as its key domain for more than 30 years. Our first big IT project was the localization of CorelDRAW 3.0 in 1993. Then we continued with the localization of MS Windows 95 and MS Office 97. From that time on, exe has been continuously expanding and developing its experience in the IT domain. Currently exe provides localization services to many key global software houses.
Further details can be found in detailed customer list and history.
Legal
Our first great legal project was the translation of the Slovak Health Care Reform for the Slovak Ministry of Health and World Bank in 2002. Later in 2008 exe started collaborating with EU institutions. We were gradually awarded contracts by the EU Commission, Parliament, the EU Court of Justice and the European Central Bank.
In 2021 the EU Commission DGT – the biggest translation ordering institution in Europe in terms of volume, awarded exe with an exclusive contract for the Slovak language. Thanks to this we were able to establish a perfectly organised professional translation community, which collaborates closely and is exclusively dedicated to legal translation. exe’s regular productivity in the legal area currently reaches up to 1.8 million words per month (i.e. approx. 6000 pages/month).
Pharma, Medical and Life Sciences
This domain is indeed the most demanding one in all aspects of the translation process. As people’s lives are at stake, this not only needs the highest levels of expertise, accuracy, responsibility but alsolinguistic and translation process quality. We are more than aware that selecting the most reliable translators, subject matter consultants and strictest quality assurance measures must be applied here.
Our first big project was the localization of Baxter hemodialysis machines in 2003. This proved to be a great success and allowed us to establish ourselves as experts in the domain.
Further details can be found in detailed customer list and history.
Other Domains
Outstanding results were also reached in other domains, especially:
– Automotive
– Business/Finance/ERP
– Multimedia
– Printers/Mobiles/Notebooks/Cameras
– Energy sector/Power Plant devices
– Airline/Mining/Furniture/Metal- and Woodwork…
Localization: Global software for
the local market
The localization process is more than just translation – it also includes a set of additional operations for correctly adapting a product to local requirements.
exe has decades of experience in handling these operations, which mainly concern the social, cultural, commercial, and technical adaptation of a product to the specific conventions of target countries, regions, groups, and their markets.
The Typical Scope of Localization
These include differing date, time and number formats; different currencies; different writing systems, characters and direction; keyboard shortcuts; idioms; political and cultural correctness; and others.
exe’s experience in localization relates mainly to software, devices, websites, and marketing texts, as well as audio/voiceover, video, and other multimedia content. It relates also to many other forms of written text which need cultural adaptation.
Localization, along with internationalization, is an integral part of the overall process called globalization.
Translation: Fidelity vs. Transparency
Fidelity and transparency are the two main interweaving ideals within translation. Unfortunately, they are often at odds and it is not easy to harmonize them:
1. FIDELITY represents the rate of accuracy that the translation renders to the meaning of the source text.
2. TRANSPARENCY represents the extent of the translation’s
conformity to the grammar, syntax, and idiom of the target language – i.e., to what extent the translation appears natural to a native speaker.
The criteria for judging fidelity vary according to the subject, type and use of the text, its literary qualities, its context, etc.; while the criteria for judging transparency are more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation simply sounds awkward.
exe’s linguists and project managers fully understand the importance of these two translation ideals. Like alchemists, they know exactly how to weigh them proportionally for each type of subject and context, for the best result. They know also how to evaluate the final output.
Over the course of 30 years of operation, exe has accumulated know-how that allows its employees to reach the highest levels of optimization in the translation process and in the assignment of resources, respecting the ideal synergy between fidelity and transparency. They know how to make it happen.
Globalization: Local Product to Global Market
The term globalization combines two aspects of language services:
1. Internationalization – I18N – which enables a product to be used without linguistic or cultural barriers.
2. Localization – L10N – which not only translates but also adapts the product to a specific locale.
Proper globalization of a product means its readiness for fast and cheap deployment in many markets at once. From a language services point of view, it means the readiness for its fast and cost saving localization into any language and locale.
To support the needs of product globalization exe consults and proposes the necessary modification and adaptation of a product’s source textual environment, in order to facilitate localization into other languages and locales. exe provides consultations, technical support and the engineering in this regard.
Machine Translation Enhanced by AI Efficiency
exe’s active monitoring of development in Machine Translation (MT) technologies has resulted in its certification to ISO 18587 – the standard specifying requirements for offering machine translation and post-editing services.
The aim of Machine Translation (MT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Large Language Models (LLM) technology is to make translation faster and more cost-effective. AI in MT has made amazing progress in this regard in recent years, especially for certain combinations of Western European languages. It has been proven without a doubt that MT in certain circumstances is capable of producing good literal translations.
Thus, exe fully accepts MT enhanced by AI as an influential power that is becoming a key part of the translation business and forecasts an even brighter future for it.
Challenging MT Language Pairs
Nevertheless, for certain domains and language pairs, especially Western European languages combined with Eastern European ones, MT is still a long way from being more effective than usual human translation. That was the reason for the development of exe’s own tools for the fair
measuring of post-edit effort based on Translation Edit Rate (TER).
Translation Edit Rate (TER) –
The Post-Editing Effort Measuring Method
The real post-editing effort can be measured through a comparison of machine translation output and final post-editing output. Currently the most accepted measurement method is TER (Translation Edit Rate). This has proven to be a good tool for the measurement of the real effort invested in post-editing. TER allows the calculation of fair and proportionate discount and is based on Edit Distance.
The Edit Distance between two strings is calculated through Levenshtein function as the minimum number of editing operations needed to transform one string into another, e.g. to transform an MT output string into a final post-edited string. Editing operations (edits) include substitution, insertion, deletion, and shift. A preferred unit for editing operations is a word.
exe pays special attention to Central and Eastern European (CEE) languages – especially Slavic ones, which are the most problematic from an MT point of view. Thus, the high number of requests for the post editing of CEE texts that were pre-translated by an MT engine was accepted as a challenge. And it is exe’s pleasure to announce it has highly competent and experienced MT post-editing teams for these languages, in order to serve our clients.
Terminology
exe continuously develops glossaries of specialized terminology in software and other fields. This has been carried out in cooperation with language experts from various in-country philological institutes. Many terms coined in exe’s glossaries are now industry standard.
exe provides terminology services to many clients – including:
– glossary creation for relevant terminology based on subject matter and language
– style guide creation and maintenance, we have experience in style guide creation
for global producers (Microsoft, Apple and others)
– source terminology moderating (moderating discussion on new terms
between clients’ development teams and target language teams),
– managing the terminology approval process,
– terminology forums, and
– maintenance of terminology queries from translation teams.
DTP – Desktop Publishing
An important consequence of the continual increase in translation requests worldwide, in every area, is a growing need for DTP pre- and post-processing services. That’s why exe integrated such tasks into its translation and localization processes many years ago.
Productivity
Currently, exe performs multilingual DTP pre- and post-processing on translated files on a daily basis, numbering in the tens of thousands of pages and graphics per month.
exe’s DTP specialists ensure that the visual layout of translated files complies with the relevant DTP quality standards, and has the same visual quality as the source files. When checking and amending the visual layout of translated files, our DTP specialists also check punctuation, headers and footers, titles, numbering and graphics, in addition to updating cross-references, tables of contents and indexes, and many other important aspects.
Driven by the development in both areas – DTP applications and translation applications (CAT) – DTP pre- and post-processing has become more and more sophisticated, but exe has managed to keep up with this
fast-paced technology development without problem.
Testing: Linguistic And Functional Testing of Products for Different Platforms
Whilst we have to admit that Murphy’s Law is ubiquitous, it is our responsibility to do our best to minimize the number of bugs per program. Based on our wide-ranging experience we can suggest a suitable localization test procedure, or we can test your product to suit your requirements.
exe has experience in the multilingual localization testing of such products as operating systems, desktop applications, GIS tools, multimedia software and websites.
In addition, exe has also tested the initial linguistic readiness of products for fast and cheap localization and deployment to the global market.
exe has at its disposal an in-house development team that programs, customizes and tests SW applications for many clients. Thanks to their expertise our process of functional testing is well established, and problematic issues can be coordinated by two divisions at the same time.