Gengo - Community news

Our community, by the numbers in 2020

Gengo — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 05:45:22 +0000

In November of last year, we announced possibly the biggest news since Gengo’s acquisition by Lionbridge at the beginning of 2019: the acquisition of Lionbridge.ai by TELUS International. Starting this month, we begin a separation of our platform — translation-specific technologies will continue an integration with Lionbridge, and AI-specific technologies will go on to become the Telus AI platform. Exciting times ahead!

In our perpetual quest for kaizen – continuous improvement, 2020 saw us make great strides in being even more active on social media, regularly engaging with our translators on the forums by providing industry-related topics for discussion, collecting feedback, and taking action accordingly. We empowered you to make better choices about your activity on the platform with brand new emails showcasing weekly language pair statistics, taking the meaning of transparency to a whole new level. We proudly took on Lionbridge colors in the redesign of our login/signup page and most of our customer-facing content, and we launched the Millionaire campaign, a new milestone of progression to reward our most dedicated translators. But most importantly, we had a lot of fun working with each and every one of you!

Last year witnessed the spread of the still ongoing global pandemic of COVID-19, but we remained strong throughout, together. As we reflect on last year’s learnings, we can’t help but to feel incredibly grateful for your hard work, commitment, and dedication within these adverse times. We did it, we’re here, it’s 2021 and we’re ready to keep on breaking barriers and building bridges together.

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Our community, by the numbers in 2019

Gengo — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 03:02:38 +0000

2019 was another exciting year of changes & learnings at Gengo, starting with our acquisition by Lionbridge in January, and we haven’t stopped growing since!

Our new status as a Lionbridge company has opened many new doors for us, from enabling us to deliver our largest translation projects to date, to accelerating our progress in the AI industry—including the rebranding of gengo.ai to Lionbridge.ai.

More and more, we’re seeing our community grow beyond translators, embracing freelancers with diverse backgrounds who join us in our quest to help the world communicate freely. This year, we got to meet some of you in person in our Tokyo office, and we’re looking forward to bringing our community together more often! Let’s take a moment today to reflect on everything we accomplished together this past year through the infographic below.

We are grateful for all of our community’s invaluable hard work, support, and commitment, and are thrilled just thinking about everything we can achieve together in 2020!

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Our community, by the numbers 2018

Gengo — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 15:00:00 +0000

Happy new year! This blog post is dedicated to the entire translator community — let’s take time to appreciate all of the hard work and notable achievements in 2018. We were extremely proud to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Gengo and the billionth processed word. We also launched Gengo.ai in March 2018, which allows us to provide a new, diverse set of non-translation tasks. Today, we at Gengo would like to express our gratitude to the translator community who made possible all of our accomplishments and successes in the past year. The new year marks and opportunity for us to reflect on these past achievements while looking ahead toward the future. 2019 is already starting off strong, and we have plans for further expansion and improvement. We’re excited to see what we can achieve together as a community in this year.

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✨ Gengo’s 3 most popular translation & language articles in 2018

Gengo — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 15:00:00 +0000

Curious which of our blog posts got the most attention in 2018? Take a look at Gengo’s most popular blog posts of the year.

1. Post-edited machine translation (PEMT) and the evolving role of translators

Post-edited machine translation (PEMT) is a type of translation that requires the reviewing, editing and correction of machine translations by a human to achieve a better output. When using machine translations (MT), post-editing is necessary. Translators need to compare the MT to the source text and check for accuracy and clarity before deciding to improve or even retranslate the text. PEMT is thus ideal for high-volume, cost-efficient projects that have tighter deadlines yet require a higher level of accuracy than the output of raw MT.

2. 16 Best Translation Management Systems

Translation management systems are essential for managing high volumes of translation projects. If you’re planning to translate your website or product, perhaps you’ve already considered using a translation management system. But did you choose the right translation management system for your specific project needs?

3. 16 Best Translation & Language Influencers to Follow on Twitter

In the translation industry, there is always more to learn. Keeping up with the latest technological trends and industry standards can seem like an impossible task, especially if you’re just a beginner in the field. That’s why we at Gengo created this list of 16 active translation and language accounts to follow on Twitter to stay up to date with the latest news. If you don’t already, follow Gengo’s official account too!

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Discover the new tasks that will take your Gengo experience to the next level

Gengo — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 15:00:00 +0000

Gengo is growing. With your help, over the last year we’ve set even higher standards for quality, attracted new customers from across the globe, and managed to pass 1 billion units processed! We’d like to thank each and every one of you for your part in this incredible achievement. It’s your hard work that has transformed us into a trailblazing translation force to be reckoned with.

However, we’re not sitting back and basking in our success. Instead, work to improve our platform and grow our customer base has already begun in earnest. It’s these efforts that we want to share with you below – and how the changes we’re making are going to bring a more diverse, exciting range of jobs to you.

Translation and beyond

Gengo is, first and foremost, a translation company. We’re proud of our work in the translation field and we’re setting ambitious new targets for 2019. In addition to this, we’ve noticed that several of our translation jobs have come hand-in-hand with a need for other specialized language services. These are largely concerned with AI training data.

You may have seen artificial intelligence portrayed on the news as a whirlwind of development on the brink of transforming the world, or even in science-fiction movies through characters like C-3PO or the Terminator. The reality is much less dramatic. Current AI technology usually takes the form of machine learning algorithms that can improve themselves at one specific task. Many of these algorithms are present in technology that we use every day, like Siri, Alexa, and Google’s search engine. To build or improve one of these algorithms, large amounts of text-based training data in multiple languages are required. As linguistic specialists, you can provide them with a level of knowledge, quality and complexity that most researchers can only dream about.

With this in mind, new tasks are beginning to appear on the workbench. Using the GE>GE qualifications which we’ve awarded to all of our translators on the Tests page, you’ll be able to try these out for yourself. Let’s walk through a few of the opportunities we’ve been attracting so far and how you can have an impact.

Sentiment analysis

In the globalized world we live in, every tweet, breaking news story and product announcement provokes a reaction. This response can make or break a business, so it’s in the interests of many people to be able to understand, analyze and predict the way that things will make us feel. Across a range of industries, machine learning algorithms are being developed to understand why sections of society feel a certain way about something. These machines are usually referred to as sentiment analysis models.

At a basic level, our role here is to read sentences or short paragraphs and say whether the author is talking about their subject in a positive, neutral or negative way. However, it’s your deep understanding of language, tone and voice that makes the difference for many of these algorithms. Machines struggle to comprehend the more subtle nuances of language, such as sarcasm and irony. You may be asked to highlight instances of this on a phrase or word level to help the algorithm get over this language barrier.

Text categorization

Organization is essential for a productive workflow. In the same way that a system helps you to keep track of all your tasks, an assortment of tags and labels helps a machine to understand the relationships between data points – and extract the maximum amount of learning potential from it. There’s a wide range of uses for text categorization, from sentiment analysis to sorting customer service tickets for a chatbot.

Performing text categorization involves reading a piece of text and marking the categories to which it applies, such as legal, business or finance. The client usually provides the classification system that specifies the level of detail they need. In some cases the text can be added to multiple categories, which helps to build a clearer picture of how each piece relates to the whole and makes it easier for the algorithm to spot useful patterns.

Entity annotation

Virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa are constantly receiving commands which they have to recognize and execute quickly. However, to a machine, speech and written text are just noise. They need structure added to the language input that they receive, so that they can understand each word or phrase and figure out the overall meaning of the text. The process of adding this meaning to different parts of speech is called entity annotation.

These projects usually involve reading a piece of text and adding labels to words or phrases according to a specific class system. This could be simple, such as tagging all names or places in a document. Alternatively, this could involve overlapping classes with only subtle differences between them. A good example of this is the difference between tagging human named entities, like Snow White, and non-human named entities, like Mickey Mouse. As this illustrates, the cultural and technical knowledge you’ve built up over years of language study is invaluable to many potential customers. They need this specialized understanding to improve their algorithm’s ability to deal with rare edge cases.

Chatbot variations

It’s a well-known fact about machines that they’re often extremely good at one specific task, but terrible at everything else. This is also true when it comes to their understanding of language. If you ask a chatbot to “put that in my shopping basket”, it can quickly complete the task for you. However, if you ask the same chatbot to “add that to my cart”, the difference in command words can actually prevent it from processing the request. Similar to the way in which language learners need to master a variety of ways to say certain things, chatbot algorithms need to be trained on many similar phrases to understand the connections between them – and to be able to guess the meaning of new phrases.

As language masters, no one is better placed than you to add the variety these chatbots need. For this task, the client would send their example sentences, also called intents, and ask you to come up with several other ways to say what is written. For example, for the intent “help me”, you could write any of the following: “please help”, “I want help”, or “I need assistance”. By combining your answers with those of other translators in our crowd, we can create a large, high-quality sample that will help the client’s chatbot function in an unpredictable world.

Image bounding boxes

At Gengo, we’re passionate about providing our translators with an interesting, diverse working experience. With this in mind, we will occasionally be placing jobs on the Dashboard that have a looser connection with language, but that we find exciting all the same!

Computer vision algorithms are the brains behind self-driving cars and several other AI products with a popular following. However, they require a large number of annotated images before they can be let loose on the road, in the warehouse or at work in the fields. The information contained in these annotations plays an important role in helping algorithms to recognize the differences between certain parts of the image. Some of these can also help machines to recognize text and identify things like product labels, which can be extremely useful for robots that move around a factory or shop floor.

Most customers ask us to annotate their images, which involves looking at the pictures and drawing shapes around certain parts of them, such as people, cars or signs. These shapes are often called bounding boxes or polygons. More detailed annotations might involve noting what is contained within the bounding box, particularly if the contents are text-based.

What about translation?

With all this talk of new tasks, we understand that some people may be concerned about the future of translation on the Gengo platform. Please be reassured that we remain 100% committed to providing you with the translation jobs you know and love. Rather than a move away from translation, these opportunities are an additional dimension of language-based tasks to explore.

Many of these new customers come to us with inextricably linked training data and translation needs. It’s your hard work and your high standards that are helping us to grow and win over clients in both sectors. Thank you for all of your efforts, and don’t forget that anything you do to help spread the word is a huge help! Feel free to share your translator profiles, recommend us to people you know and engage with us on social media – we always enjoy hearing from you.

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16 Best Translation & Language Influencers to Follow on Twitter

Gengo — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 15:00:00 +0000

Translators & Interpreters

@integlangsbiz: Dr. Jonathan Downie is a consultant interpreter and French/English conference interpreter.

The gap between how machine #interpreting is sold and what it can actually do is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the task. #1nt #tech #journorequest
— Dr Jonathan Downie (@integlangsbiz) October 19, 2018

@interpretaatioo: Henry Líu is an interpreter, translator, and 13th President of the International Federation of Translators (FIT).
@ContractSpeak: Richard Lackey is a legal translator and qualified member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI).
@Tesstranslates: Tess Whitty is a certified English-Swedish translator and localizer, as well as marketing consultant, author, trainer, speaker, mom, and yogi.
@LucyWTranslator: Lucy Williams is a English/Spanish translator and blogger for tourism, leisure, food, and fashion.
@UweMuegge: Uwe Muegge tweets about job, internship, and event opportunities in translation, localization, interpreting, and terminology.
@mstranslations: Mariana Serio is an English/Spanish business translation expert from Argentina, helping clients expand to the Latin American market.
@cdmellinger: Chris Mellinger, Ph.D in translation studies, translator and interpreter, editor, Assistant Professor of Spanish Interpreting and Translation Studies.
@ceciliaenback: CEO of Swedish LSP Translator Scandinavia, co-organizer of Nordic Translation Industry Forum.
@DanielaZambrini: Daniela Zamrini is a freelance Italian/English translator specialized in airline industry, logistics, legal, nautical, and aerospace and defence topics.

Translation & Language News

@slatornews: Slator makes business sense of the language services and technology market with news on the people and deals that shape the industry.

Launching the Slator 2018 #Blockchain and #Translation Report: We're looking at current language industry-related blockchain projects and examine if there are there any potential use cases for blockchain in translation. #Crypto #CryptoNews #l10n #xl8 https://t.co/tC9grIWU5e
— Slator (@slatornews) October 22, 2018

@UnitedLanguage: United Language Group is a leading global language service provider specializing in translation, localization, and interpretation.
@multilingualmag: MultiLingual magazine, website, and newsletter are information sources for localization, global business, translation and language technology.
@atanet: American Translators Association (ATA) is the largest professional association of translators and interpreters in the United States, with nearly 11,000 members in over 100 countries.
@ConcLangVillage: Concordia Language Villages is the premier language and culture immersion program in the United States, offering programs for youth, adults, and families in 15 languages.
@LitTranslate: The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) promotes literary translation through advocacy, education and services to literary translators.

Looking to discover even more translation and language influencers to follow? Check out our full custom list of favorite translation and language influencers to follow.

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Our community, by the numbers 2017

Gengo — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 15:00:00 +0000

2017 was a remarkable year of growth, learnings, and laying the foundation for an exciting road ahead at Gengo. We’re proud and honored to have helped thousands of customers from all over the world overcome language barriers and take their businesses to greater heights. And we fully recognize these accomplishments would not have been possible without our 21,000-strong (and still growing!) translator community. As we welcome 2018 with new goals and aspirations, let’s take a moment to reflect on the past year’s achievements.

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Faces of Gengo: Ryan

Gengo — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 15:00:00 +0000

Young, talented and driven, Ryan is one of the first software engineers who joined our Manila office in late 2016. In this interview, he shares some of the best things about working at Gengo, what he’s learned so far, and his goals and aspirations for the future. Nationality: Filipino Hometown: Caloocan City, Philippines Languages: Filipino (Tagalog) and English Education: Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, STI College Fairview Where have you lived before, and what were your previous roles? I was born in Saudi Arabia and my family moved back to the Philippines when I was six. Before Gengo, I worked as a software engineer at Global Pinoy Remittance & Services, YiLinker, and Agila Pera Padala. How long have you worked at Gengo and what drew you to the company? I joined Gengo in November 2016. I was drawn to the company’s diversity and I was interested in working with and learning from people from different nationalities. What do you most enjoy about your role? Everything is new for me and when I joined, I realized that there’s still so much more to learn. I enjoy learning new concepts, best practices, and approaches from senior engineers, Nino, Toshipon, and Andrea. I also learned how to manage my time wisely to meet deadlines. Recently, I had to interview candidates and many of them were older and more experienced than me. It was an interesting experience.

A typical day for Ryan in the Manila office

What have been some of your favorite projects you’ve worked on at Gengo, and why? We recently built and launched an integration with Payoneer that our translators can use to send the money they make on our platform to their bank account. That was the first project I worked on from scratch at Gengo. It was challenging because it was my first time using the Python language to build microservices. But it was also very fulfilling for me because I learned a new coding language and I knew the integration would make Gengo a better platform for our translators. What are your personal goals at Gengo? I’d like to learn how to communicate more confidently and become a great speaker especially in front of big groups. I’m also hoping to be a great team leader. If there’s an opportunity, I’d like to experience working overseas, too.

Relaxing at Balinmanok beach in Pangasinan, Philippines

What do you think makes Gengo a great place to work? Everyone’s open to collaboration. I like that there’s no seniority in the team and they treat me as an equal. I also enjoy “Beer and read”, where we share knowledge over beer every other Friday. I really appreciate that there’s a budget for hackathons, team building activities and team lunches. The company makes us feel valued and appreciated. What do you do in your spare time? I travel four to five times a year to unwind. I love exploring beaches and islands in the Philippines. My favorites are Sumilon in Cebu, Cagbalete in Quezon, and Kalanggaman Island in Leyte. I also enjoy hiking and I love Mt. Ulap in Baguio. This year, I’m planning to go to Isla Gigantes in Iloilo.

Ryan at the peak of Mt. Batulao in Batangas, Philippines

Want to work at Gengo?

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Mid-year community update 2017

Gengo — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 15:00:00 +0000

Over the last seven months, the Gengo platform and translator community have undergone significant change and improvement. We welcomed close to 800 new translators so far and have successfully delivered close to 200 million units of translation since the beginning of the year. We also released a number of exciting updates and new features to the system to improve job accessibility, quality feedback, and the overall translator experience based on valuable feedback from the community.

Better translator rewards

The translator community continues to be at the core of Gengo. At the beginning of 2017, we introduced higher translator reward rates for 27 language pairs. The new rates were based on several factors, including baseline rates in the industry and translators’ cost of living. Since the change, we have seen positive effects throughout the Gengo platform, with increased translator activity and higher satisfaction among customers thanks to faster translation turnaround times.

New onboarding guide and tutorial

Our commitment to enhancing the Gengo experience is reflected in our ongoing efforts and future plans. To facilitate a better onboarding process and guidance, we’ve created an onboarding tutorial. Sent to newly approved translators, the onboarding tutorial provides a step-by-step walkthrough of our dashboard, explaining how to use it efficiently and offering useful tips, such as using an RSS feed reader to gain faster access to jobs. We’re also working on streamlining our communication process with our active translators.

Third-party offerings

Gengo is also proud to have forged collaborations and partnerships with trusted third-party services this year. In June, we teamed up with Payoneer to offer more payment options and flexibility to our translators. In August, Feeder launched the all new Gengo Power-up, joining Rumpelstiltskin as a Gengo-dedicated RSS feed reader that helps translators access jobs based on their needs and preferences.

Improved GoCheck reviews and feedback

To meet our customers’ standards and expectations, we also made improvements to our GoCheck and translator performance reviews with the help of our Quality team and Language Specialists. We aim to provide clearer and more constructive feedback so our translators can learn from their errors and help them improve their craft, while consistently providing quality translations.

Translator Meetup in Tokyo

The needs of our translator community are important to us and we strive to ensure that communication lines are always open. In late July, we organized a successful Translator Meetup in Tokyo, a great opportunity for Gengo teams to meet our dedicated translators face-to-face and listen to their ideas, feedback, and suggestions. We’re looking forward to holding more events in different cities in the future. Let us know if you’d like to host! Continuous improvement is one Gengo’s core values. As we aspire to meet the growing demands of our customers, we plan to constantly innovate and improve the Gengo experience for our dedicated translators all year round. If you have any feedback and suggestions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us! Want to become a Gengo translator?

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Gengo community come together for Tokyo meetup

Gengo — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 15:00:00 +0000

JULY 2017 — On July 28, Gengo staff and translators came together for a meetup in Tokyo’s Marunouchi district. It was a rare opportunity for the operators of Gengo to meet and speak with translators from all walks of life and backgrounds, each with a unique Gengo story.

CEO Matt welcomes translators to the event and discusses the future of Gengo

We met translators both new and old to the Gengo platform, from translators who had yet to translate their first job (but keen on getting started) to seven-year veterans with hundreds of thousands of units translated on the Gengo platform.

A translator from Japan talks about her experiences with Gengo

Attendees represented 10 different language pairs, covering not only Japanese and English but also Chinese, Korean, Russian, French and Spanish. Geographically, translators traveled to the event from different cities, with one translator coming from Osaka, Japan, and even from as far as Seoul, Korea!

Community manager Lara shares recent improvements made to enhance the Gengo experience

With a community close to 22,000 translators, events like this give Gengo the much-needed opportunity to get to know our translators on a personal level and a chance to hear their stories, experiences, issues, and ideas. We learned that several attendees specialize in very advanced topics and that they’d like to be able to work on projects in their respective fields. Others expressed the disappointing feeling when an available job gets snatched up right away, leaving hopeful translators empty-handed. These are two issues that we are committed to solving and have prioritized for the future.

Attendees mingle and exchange ideas with Gengo staff and fellow translators

For translators, this meetup was also an opportunity to meet other like-minded translators, which can be difficult in the translation industry, where most work is done in isolation. Gengo is very proud to support a community where translators can easily discuss various topics online, and it adds something a bit special to be able to engage with other community members in person from time to time. Tokyo is just one of the thousands of places around the world with a strong Gengo community. In the future, we’d like to hold events in other cities in an effort to get to know more of the translators who make the Gengo community so special. If you’re interested in helping us organize a translator event in your city, please let us know by sending an email to Lara, our community manager. Once again, thank you to all those who took the time out of their busy schedules to make this translator meetup a memorable event! Want to become a Gengo translator?

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