Shenzhen Cloud Translation Technology Co., Ltd. was established in 2016, with wholly-owned subsidiaries Xiamen Cloud Translation Technology Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Cloud Translation Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. In December 2020, it successfully passed the national high-tech enterprise certification, entering the ranks of high-tech enterprises. Cloud Translation Technology focuses on artificial intelligence technology, specializing in the research and development of natural language processing technologies, including text translation, reading comprehension, speech recognition, speech synthesis, voiceprint recognition, sound recording, and image recognition. The company has independently developed a deep neural network machine translation model that integrates three generations of machine translation technology, trained on billions of high-quality industry-specific sentence pairs. Currently, it supports mutual translation for 65 language pairs and 20 vertical sub-fields, dedicated to providing leading machine translation solutions and natural language processing research and development platforms for global industry users. The core technical team and translation team of Cloud Translation Technology have been deeply engaged in the fields of machine translation and language services for over thirty years, ranking among the top tier in NLP research in the country.
Official Website:https://cloudtranslation.com/online/
1) The translator uses their preferred browser (recommended Firefox or Google Chrome), searches for “Cloud Translation” in the search bar to enter the official website, and selects “Free Trial” on the homepage to access the online translation interface. The benefit of this online translation is that it can automatically recognize the translation language, saving time on selecting the source and target languages.
Copy and paste the text that needs to be translated. Another advantage of this software is that the translator does not need to manually click the “Translate” button. As soon as the text is pasted, the translation is generated immediately, which is very fast.
Files can be directly dragged and dropped onto the webpage, supporting various common formats such as doc, pptx, and pdf. When the document contains images, the translator can also choose whether to translate the images within the document. This feature saves the tedious steps of document processing. For example, when facing an urgent translation task, if the translator only needs to translate the text within the document, they can select “No” in this software to skip the image translation, thus avoiding the need to convert document formats, remove images, and add images back after translation, which is convenient and time-saving. It is worth noting that this feature requires the translator to log into their account.
As for the alignment method, this software supports both paragraph alignment and sentence alignment formats, making bilingual comparison clear at a glance.
After translation is completed, the translator can choose to download the file or directly click the “Post-Translation Editing” button to jump to a new page for online post-translation editing work.
Post-translation editing mainly includes three aspects: “Original Text Matching,” “TM Search,” and “Terminology Database”
All translated documents can also be found in the homepage under 【My Documents】 for downloading and other operations.
Translation memory consists of bilingual sentence pairs. Regular users can establish one or more personal translation memories using existing original and translated sentence pairs. During the translation process, the system will automatically search for identical or similar translation resources in the default or specified translation memory, providing reference translations to help users avoid unnecessary repetitive work, allowing them to focus only on translating new content. This helps achieve the reuse of translation data and maintain consistency in translation style.
2.4 My Terminology Database
Terminology consists of bilingual vocabulary. The terminology database is an automated bilingual dictionary, allowing regular users to establish one or more personal terminology databases using existing original and translated vocabulary to store terminology data in specialized fields. During the translation process, the system will automatically search the default or specified terminology database, applying specified terminology to the translation results. This helps achieve uniformity in company language and consistency in the wording of text content.
In addition to online translation, Cloud Translation also offers a paid service for converting audio and video to text + translation. Users in need can experience it themselves. Its website is www.transwai.com
TransWAI supports drag-and-drop file uploads and can accurately process the original audio/video, such as identifying whether the source language is Chinese/English and what field it belongs to. However, the author believes that the option to select only one source language is somewhat lacking, as some simultaneous or consecutive interpretation audio/video may contain multiple source and target languages, and it should support the selection of multiple languages simultaneously.
The translator used a selected English-to-Chinese excerpt as the original text to test the “Cloud Translation” online translation platform, trying out functions such as 【Text Translation】【Document Translation】【Web Translation】【My Documents】【Translation Memory】【Terminology Database】, and personally found it relatively convenient and quick, making it easy for beginners to get started. However, regarding the translations, the resulting translations still exhibit significant mechanical characteristics, with issues of fluency, such as: “they selected notable natural features along the way…沿途选择了引人注目的自然特征…” The translation lacks a subject and is confusing, making it not smooth. In the 【Post-Translation Editing】 page, each editing section requires manual editing; if a sentence does not need modification, the translator still needs to manually copy and paste the translation, which is somewhat cumbersome. It is suggested that the initial machine translation be placed in the editing section, allowing the translator to modify based on that translation; additionally, there is a “Original Text Comparison” function in the post-translation editing section, providing word-for-word translation comparison. The translator feels that the word-level comparison is too small, which can lead to a stiff and fragmented translation, and it is recommended to use sentence or paragraph units instead. Overall, the online translation, translation memory, and terminology database functions are still quite useful.
As for its 【TransWAI Subtitle System】 and 【Intelligent Language Teaching Platform】 features, there are two major drawbacks: 1. These two functions are not free; 2. Many features are not fully developed.
Note: This is a learning work for reference only, and corrections are welcome.
Edited by: Britney
