Better Machine Translation
The breakthrough in better machine translation (MT) for translators, Slate Desktop™ is machine translation fully adapted to the knowledge and style in your translation memories.
The Slate Desktop™ is an application suite that adds a machine translation provider to your personal computer. The provider runs in the background delivering machine translations to computer-assisted translation tools like memoQ, Trados Studio and others that also run on your PC.
Customers have shared these top benefits when using Slate Desktop™.
- Productivity: It speeds their work and reduces turnaround time. (see Measuring Productivity)
- Quality: It uses their words, grammar and translation style, not someone else’s.
- Lifestyle: It frees their weekends and gives them time to do those little things that make life fun.
“Privacy is a fundamental human right. It has been under attack.”
Tim Cook – Apple’s CEO, CNN Interview June 5, 2018
- Private and Confidential: It runs on their PC, not the Internet. Prying eyes on the Internet can not access customers’ translations or their work habits.
- Economic: The one-time affordable price buys a royalty-free license. They never have to pay for machine translation again.
- Convenient: They work with machine translations in the CATs they already know. There’s no need to learn yet another CAT tool.
How Slate Desktop™ Works
You import your translation memories into Slate Desktop™. It does the rest.
Slate Desktop™ uses mature machine learning. It studies your translation memories for hours to find your translation knowledge and style. It saves what it learned in a translation model that’s fully adapted to your translation memories.
Your Slate Desktop™ model appears in your CAT tool’s machine translation resources. Working in your CAT tool, Slate Desktop™ uses artificial intelligence to render machine translation suggestions with the terminology, knowledge and style it learned from your translation memories.
Your choice of translation memories determines the quality of the machine translations. Translation memories that represent you fully adapt Slate Desktop™ to you and Slate Desktop™ machine translation mimics you.
With Slate Desktop™‘s fully-adapted machine translations, you work with your own words and translation style. You make fewer corrections. Machine translation becomes a more effective work environment. This is the essence of better machine translation.
Application Suite
Slate Desktop™ suite is a collection of applications. Each application performs a specific function. Together as a suite, they increase your productivity to achieve and maintain your competitive edge.
- Slate Corpus™ application is built-in. It organizes translation memories and converts them to training corpora.
- Slate Desktop™ dashboard is your control center to build and manage translation engines.
- Slate Connect™ application is build-in. It runs in the background, quietly delivering machine translations to your computer-assisted translation tool.
- Slate Toolkit™ is built-in with machine translation tools for phrase-based SMT models.
Slate Desktop™ installs everything you need to organize your translation memories, convert them into a training corpus, build translation engines, connect to computer-assisted translation tools and much more.
Measuring Productivity
Slate Desktop™ recommends two objective productivity measurements.
- Percentage of proofreading-only suggestions (no post-editing required).1
- Percentage of reduction in post-edit work where post-editing is required.2
Google NMT is our productivity baseline because it’s a popular and well-documented resource. To illustrate, let’s compare a typical 10,000-word project with 700-segments.
On average, Google NMT suggests 35 segments of up to 6 words each that are proofreading-only segments. On a word-count basis, that’s only 2% of the 10,000 word-project. Almost any professional could have typed each of these segments in an instant without Google. The other 98% are much longer segments require post-editing to varying degrees.
1. On average, a customer’s fully-adapted Slate Desktop™ engine suggests 7 to 10 times more proofreading-only segments than Google’s NMT. A customer’s engine typically suggests over 200 segments of up to 20 words each, more than 3,000 words, that require no post-editing. Nearly 30% of the work is reduced to proofreading only.
2. On average where post-editing is required, a customer’s Slate Desktop™ engine reduces the post-editing work by 50% compared to Google NMT, largely because the post-editing work drops from 98% to 70% of the project. There’s an additional drop from Slate Desktop™‘s adaptations to render words, grammar and translation style that you, the translator, are predisposed to choose.
These two objective measurements indicate specific, engine-related productivity gains and avoid subjective speculation, personal preferences, habits and other issues that affect your work efficiency.
Machine Translation vs Translation Memories
Your choice of a training corpus is the single, most important factor that determines your machine translation’s productivity characteristics. Fully-adapted machine translation is built from a training corpus that matches your work.
Slate Desktop™ converts translation memories into a training corpus. When the translation memories consists of 3-4 years of segments that you translated, the resulting machine translation is fully adapted to you and it’s more flexible compared to translation memories.
A translation memory with 100,000 segment pairs can offer roughly that many translations. Fragments and sub-segments are overlooked.
Starting with the same 100,000 segment pairs, Slate Desktop™‘s artificial intelligence automatically builds the dictionaries and configures an engine overnight while you sleep. The engine can suggest hundreds of millions of translations and you can use the engine across many CAT tools without additional work.
Some computer-assisted translation tools have advanced segment assembly or fragment matching features. You invest weeks to create dictionaries and configure the feature. The dictionaries work in one CAT tool. Then, you reinvest time to create other dictionaries for another CAT tool.
Translation Teams, Agencies and Small LSPs
Slate Desktop™ is machine translation for a single-language vendor (SLV), whether freelancers and translation teams working a single language pair.
The standalone Slate Connect™ application, purchased separately, gives you an inexpensive way to use your Slate Desktop™ machine translation engine on another PC while you travel. Slate Connect™ also opens a unique and affordable business case to share Slate Desktop™ machine translation engines with your colleagues and team members without complicated, expensive web servers.
Multi-language vendors (MLVs) need Slate Desktop Pro™ for machine translation across all language pairs, currently 1,122 pairs.
Redefine What’s Possible
You’re not alone. We made Slate Desktop™ user-friendly and familiar like other applications you already know. Still, everyone needs help sometimes.
Slate Desktop™ defies conventional wisdom about what’s possible with machine translation. That’s why we’re here with you to answer questions and support you with these resources when you need us.
- 90-page online User’s Manual with illustrated instructions and strategies
- An illustrated Quick Start Guide to have you working with your first engine within hours
- Free engine evaluations to coach you through your new experiences
- Priority technical support via a help desk so your requests don’t fall through the cracks
- Free maintenance updates and bug fixes via your personal online account dashboard
- Affordable online CPT training courses to get the most from machine translation (soon)
Money Back Guarantee
Buy Slate Desktop™, experience great technical support and learn how your translation memories perform as machine translation. If you’re not fully satisfied, uninstall Slate Desktop™ and request a refund within 60 days of your purchase. We will refund your full purchase price immediately – no questions asked.
Slate Desktop™
- 2 languages from a choice of 34 languages (1,122 language pairs)
- Install Slate Desktop™ on one (1) PC
Slate Desktop Pro™
- All 34 languages (1,122 language pairs)
- Install Slate Desktop Pro™ on two (2) PCs