At Gengo, our workbench works hard with our translators around-the-clock. We are committed to making sure our company’s “engine” is running smoothly and efficiently at all times. In our last update, we improved the comments section, site navigation, and mobile-responsiveness of the translator workbench. Since then, we’ve made improvements to some existing features, in addition to constantly enhancing our Translation Memory (TM) and validation systems. In this post, we also wish to highlight specific functions that will make translation more hassle-free for translators and customers alike:

1. Comments made visual

As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” That’s why we’ve found a way for customers to upload images and multimedia attachments, such as videos and audio files, to the comment section of the workbench. The ability to upload visual content adds more context, clarification, and a better idea of where and how translations are used. We recommend making the most of this feature to improve translation quality, particularly in the case of user reviews and product descriptions for ecommerce sites.

2. Machine translation (MT) alert

Another addition to our workbench system—machine translation detection. We’ve built a tool that can detect machine translations to ensure fairness, translation quality, and customer satisfaction. We take pride in the skills and capabilities of our hardworking translator community and we believe they can provide high-quality translations like no machine can.

3. Job filters to stay organized

Job filters serve as our translators’ filing assistant particularly when working on bigger collections. These functions can help improve translator productivity by keeping jobs organized to promote better quality translations done in less time. Translators are able to filter jobs by category:

• Empty – These are jobs translators have accepted but haven’t started working on yet.
• Unsubmitted – These are unfinished and pending jobs that translators haven’t submitted to the customer.
• Submitted – These are translations that have been completed, reviewed, and submitted to the customer.
• Revising – Customers may request revisions after reviewing submitted jobs. In this section, translators will find translations they need to revise and re-submit based on the latest feedback.
• Cautions & Errors – These jobs include cautions which indicate spelling mistakes or missing glossary matches. Validation errors, such as untranslated and misspelled words, are also highlighted for translators to amend before submission.

4. Flagging for productivity

Our improved flagging function works as an S.O.S. whenever a translator needs Gengo’s help while translating on the workbench. This function has three main uses: First, translators can alert Gengo whenever the source text provided is inappropriate for its language pair or tier (e.g. it should be a Pro job, not a Standard one). Second, translators can flag a job if they need more context and information from the client to work more effectively on the project. Third, translators can flag to report a technical problem on a job or collection. Our teams monitor these flagged issues, try to respond to queries, and resolve issues as soon as possible.

5. Shortcuts for efficiency

To help translators save time and turn jobs around faster, we’ve added more shortcuts under the Tools section that can help them work more efficiently:

• Issues – When translators use this shortcut, the validation panel will appear on the right side of their translations. This feature identifies and marks validation issues or errors that they can review and resolve before submission.
• Matches – This shortcut will open the matches panel on the right side to display any translation memory (TM) matches.
• Insert match – Our translators can use this shortcut to automatically insert the best translation memory matches and help speed up the translation process.

What other improvements would you like to see on the Gengo workbench? We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments!