Case Study
Agence Europe: fast translations thanks to machine translation and post-editing
News agency Agence Europe publishes a daily newsletter for French-speaking and English-speaking subscribers. The articles are mainly written in French and thus have to be translated into English in real time every day. A hefty translation job with tight deadlines for which Agence Europe turned to ELAN Languages.
Agence Europe's request
Agence Europe had always used its own translators to translate the newsletter.
A coordinator made the articles available to the translators for translation into English, a repetitive yet time-consuming and manual task. The texts were translated directly on the editorial platform, without translation memories, terminology database or even a spell-check function (apart from those provided by word processing programs). Needless to say, this did not improve the quality of the translations.
Agence Europe was looking for a solution to relieve the pressure on its team at no extra cost and which would ultimately result in better translations. That is why the news agency partnered with ELAN Languages in 2018. The challenge: translate a considerable volume of European news articles within a few hours, five days per week, while maintaining a high level of quality.”
"ELAN Languages delivers fast and flawless translations faithful to the French source every day. They are part of what makes the newsletter such a success."
Lorenzo Riccardi
Managing director at Agence Europe
Our service
In that context, ELAN felt it was worth testing whether machine translation with thorough post-editing of the texts was an option.
Targeted training
A few machine translations were evaluated to determine how they performed with regards to Agence Europe’s articles. After extensive checking, the system with the highest fluency was chosen. The post-editors were carefully selected and also followed a project-specific training programme. They were instructed to use as many of the machine translations as possible, but to rewrite them where necessary. A style guide was created for the project together with Agence Europe. A terminology database was also set up to ensure correct use of terminology.Saving time thanks to automation
To reduce coordination time and to ensure quick and easy file exchange, ELAN Languages examined how the entire process could be automated. They opted for a cloud-based tool allowing full automation of the following steps:- importing the articles from the client’s editorial tool to create a translation project using the template that includes the translation memory, term base and a predefined pool of dedicated post-editors;
- having the articles pre-translated into English by the translation machine and using the translation memory;
- automatic job assignment to one of the selected post-editors for thorough post-editing of articles;
- exporting the edited and proofread English articles to the client's editorial tool.
This workflow allows linguists to work in a comfortable environment and relieves them of the mundane tasks. The translation machine and automated process will take care of those things. This gives the team more time and space to focus on the content, such as finding the right equivalent in the target language for a metaphor used in the source text, or keeping the communication flow within the team and with the client smooth and sound.
Human Translation 
Machine Translation 