Articles and Stories

May 21, 2014

Thank you for calling. Your call is very important to us, please stay on the line and the next…

The world is shrinking and global markets are growing rapidly. To keep up with this growth, many companies created automated systems and whenever you pick up a phone, you are likely to hear a recording and are confronted with various options before you can connect to a real person.

The population of non-English speakers in the U.S. is expanding and companies are trying to get their business by translating such automated systems. World Translation Center has specialized in the translation of such automated systems and writing programming notes to make the systems work grammatically correct in other languages.

We have translated and recorded such systems for banks, for doctors’ offices, for insurance companies, hotels and many other companies. Our voices talk to you in large stores, in supermarkets, universities, at wake-up calls, banks, hotlines etc.

The easiest and most efficient way to create such systems is by spitting up sentences and have these fragments recorded and then program the system in such a way that it assembles these fragments into full sentences.

However, translating partial sentences into other languages and putting them back together for a full sentence does not always work the same as in English. German, for example, puts verbs at the end of a sentence. A 4-segment sentence can easily turn into 5-segments to be grammatically correct.

Numbers are always part of every automated system and recorded individually and then combined to say dates, times or currencies. But that does not work easily for other languages. Several languages have two sets of words for some numbers where English only has one; some languages add masculine and femine endings to numbers depending on the noun that follows. Some countries count differently altogether.

Many countries use the 24-hour clock and not am and pm. How do you work around using ‘am’ and ‘pm’ when a country uses the 24 hour clock or ‘in the morning’, ‘at noon’, ‘in the afternoon’, ‘in the evening’, ‘at night’, ‘at midnight’?

There are ways to re-write a few of the English sentence fragments, but most of the time extensive programming notes need to be writen so that the engineer can re-program for another language. These notes require working closely with a linguist to understand all the grammatical differences of any language and giving examples with back translation.

The next time you hear, press such-and-such to hear another language, test your language skill and think about what was involved to translate and record this.