Chip Chick
With trade barriers on their way out (for better or worse), making a business competitive globally is no longer advantageous — it’s necessary. And until we have Matrix-like machines to upload foreign languages directly into our brains, that’s going to mean that eventually, you’re going to have to communicate with someone who speaks a language you don’t know. That’s why translation has become the latest focus of tech — Google Translate is constantly being improved, while Skype is continuing to roll out real-time translation during voice chats. Xerox is now stepping in with their own services, and for once, the human translators and interpreters of the world can breathe a sigh of relief.
Starting today, Xerox is rolling out their Easy Translator Service. While the service will exist as a web app, Xerox is taking the interesting step of adding translation services to their multi-function printers. At its most basic, you’ll be able to tap a few buttons on a ConnectKey-enabled Xerox printer, scan a document, and have a translation of that document printed instantly using machine translation. At launch, the service will work with over 40 languages and can preserve formatting, meaning that presentable, machine translated documents can be printed in less than a minute.
That alone might be good for a sentence or two, but most businesses aren’t going to need just a sentence or two translated. As documents get longer and the ideas deeper and more jargon-laden, machine translation starts to lag badly behind the abilities of human translators. Fortunately, Xerox didn’t just stick a Google Translate-lite into their printers and call it a day. The Easy Translator Service is a full-blown enterprise suite that includes options to get different levels of human translation and cloud storage. Paid options will include machine-translated documents edited by a human, direct human translation and editing, and professional translation from someone with expertise in the relevant field.
This all works over the cloud, meaning that the Easy Translator Service isn’t just limited to Xerox’ printers. The service can be accessed through a web browser or using a mobile app. With an account, users will be able to store completed translations to print or access later. They can also search for translators at various pricing levels. Xerox has partnered with ABBYY Language Solutions, which runs the SmartCAT marketplace. Using that marketplace, Easy Translator Service users will have access to over 50,000 translators and interpreters.
While the cloud part might be easier to manage in a browser or mobile app, it’ll still be accessible from ConnectKey-enabled Xerox printers. Not only does that mean documents can be translated and printed using those printers and nothing else, it means that a document can be scanned, uploaded to the cloud, translated, and ready to share faster than ever before.
But, if you’re going to opt for browser or mobile, that’ll give you a more expansive UI to work with. Both are available now, with the mobile app launching on both Android and iOS.
