Translation services have always been part of the picture for scientific researchers and publishers. But since last year up to now, the need for translating and interpreting services has increased, along with video subtitling. As conferences have been canceled and international travel has become limited, translation has moved online. We’ll look at four of the ways in which healthcare and corporate responsibility professionals have learned to cope with multilingual content and conversations during the health crisis.

How Do Translation Services Prove Essential for Multilingual SEO?

Translation services are also required when the goal is to allow foreign readers to access the content efficiently, especially in search results. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a technical practice in constant flux due to the changing algorithms of Google and other search engines. Each target language requires not only a translation but also about keyword selection and implementation. This includes knowledge of the available tools for expediting the SEO process. Not every translator has these skills: another reason to work with translation services knowledgeable in keyword selection and implementation. Translation services in particular possess the industry-specific knowledge of multilingual SEO, which may scale up businesses.

Multilingual SEO is the term used for this specialization. An article published by Yoast, a leading SEO software application provider, details the nuances of this specialty. A key issue is avoiding duplicate content, which Google can recognize and penalize if your content pages use similar words and phrases. Skillful use of the hreflang HTML tag can avoid some but not all problems. Better to work, in each target language, with translators who also possess SEO expertise in that language. 

How Do Translation Services Provide Subtitles and Closed Captions? 

These days, translation services are often called on to add subtitles and captions to videos. This is essential when it is important to give the video viewer an instant understanding of what is being said, especially when it is hard to understand, speaking in a foreign language. This is true especially if the viewer is hearing impaired, or if the video is expected to be used in situations where the audio cannot be easily heard, such as in airports or other public areas.

The use of subtitles and closed captions are also an art form requiring specialized skills in translation. The translator must be an expert in extracting the bare essence of the content and rendering that in subtitles. Otherwise, the screen will be cluttered with text and the viewer will not be able to read the titles fast enough to keep up. There also needs to be coordinated with the video editor to insert the subtitles at exactly the right time and video pace.

How Is Interpreting Necessary for Businesses?

Naturally, it’s better to understand what is being said in a meeting or conference as it’s taking place. That’s why there’s a need for interpreting what’s said if one or more participants speak different languages than the others. This method of interpreting can be either simultaneous, performed almost at the same time as the speaker speaks, or consecutive, performed after a speaker completes every few sentences.

Microsoft Translator has a unique approach to support multilingual conferences by using speech-to-text conversion in one language, then translation and text-to-speech in the other language. In principle, this allows instantaneous feedback for one-to-many online speeches and keynotes, though it is less helpful for many-to-many conversations. And, as a rule, a good human linguist will outperform even AI-powered machine translators. So, if your budget allows, then splurge for human interpreters and translators for each language pair so your valuable multilingual content doesn’t get lost in translation.

How Do Businesses Utilize Video Conference Recordings?

 Face-to-face professional meetings and conferences have been replaced with video calls on Zoom, Google Hangouts and Skype. That works fine for casual conversation but it’s not enough for professional exchanges. Zoom and some other video conferencing software applications enable recording, but that still begs the question about how valuable content can best be preserved “for the record” and for the utility of future researchers. The problem with recorded content is the difficulty of finding and recovering what is valuable in what has been said.

If you decide to record an audio or video conference, you are left with the question of what to do with the recording. If all the speakers in a conference spoke the same language, hire professional services to transcribe what was said using a single translation pair.

If more than one language was spoken in the call, or if there is a need to reach an international audience, then translators may be needed. If foreign languages were spoken in the call, then a native-language translator will be called in to listen to content in the specific foreign language he or she knows, and then to render it in the desired language. Ideally, there should be an accurate rendering of what was said in the source language as well as the translation.