News
A&A LINGUA SIGNS MAJOR CONTRACT WITH EUROPEAN COMMISSION
21.09.202026.06.2020
With economies reeling due to the global pandemic, we’re especially pleased to announce that A&A Lingua and two partners have been awarded a TRAD19 international translation contract from the European Commission.
Because of the volumes of work involved, we joined two other companies specializing in translations of European Union documents to bid on this contract. The consortium is made up of Discripta OÜ (leader), A&A Lingua OÜ and Tõlkebüroo Pangloss OÜ.
The contract start date is 1 July 2020.
A&A Lingua has been a translation partner of the European Commission since 2004
Letting experts proofread ad copy: a smart choice
21.09.202016.01.2019
Many companies are reluctant to hire an outside editor take a look at their ad copy, believing that they know best, but is this always wise?
The answer is no. Typos and awkward phrasing in key ad content could directly mean money lost for a company. Compared to the harm to reputation caused by a gaffe in a website or brochure, the cost of reprinting or rewriting is much lower, and prevention is best of all.
If you’ve spent years building your company’s trustworthiness and public image, you don’t want sloppiness to cause doubt to creep into the minds of your customers.
To make sure your essential content is grammatically correct, easy to read and free of errors, it’s best to let experts proofread or copy edit your company’s messaging.
A&A Lingua offers proofreading for ad copy in Estonian, Finnish, English, German and many other languages. Our editors are all native speakers of their respective languages.
To learn more or ask for an estimate, visit A&A Lingua’s website: https://www.lingua.ee/teenused/toimetamine-ja-korrektuur/
Exciting new developments in the field of language technology
21.09.202008.10.2018
We recently visited the European Language Resources Coordination (ELRC) to learn about exciting advances in language technology research, solutions and applications.
if you’re interested in languages and technology, the following links are worth a read.
https://keeleressursid.ee/et/eesti-keeleressursside-keskus The Centre of Estonian Language Resources makes digital Estonian language resources and technologies (software, dictionaries, text and speech databases, language databases) available for researchers as well as for anyone else with an interest in the field.
https://keeleressursid.ee/et/keeleressursid/konetootlusvahendid https://keeleressursid.ee/et/keeleressursid/tekstitootlusvahendid
Major strides are finally being made in the field of speech-to-text and text-to-speech in Estonian. Visit http://bark.phon.ioc.ee/ and https://www.eki.ee/heli/
Both speech-to-text and text-to-speech are a great help for the visually and hearing impaired. An example of Estonian-language subtitles converted to speech: https://www.eki.ee/heli/images/koduleht/isa_brown.mp4
A website called the Voice Recording Browser has a selection of transcriptions, such as Vikerraadio’s news program from the day before or Kuku Raadio’s midday talk show http://bark.phon.ioc.ee/tsab/p/index
As translators, we find the Institute of the Estonian Language’s databases of terminology for professional use https://term.eki.ee/termbases/index/ to be a useful resource and it is also fascinating to try out the latest neural net translation capabilities at http://neurotolge.ee/ , https://live.xn--neurotlge-v7a.ee/ and https://www.translate2018.eu/#/text
A few more sophisticated solutions:
https://metashare.ut.ee/ META-SHARE is an open, integrated, secure and interoperable sharing and exchange facility for LRs (datasets and tools) for the Human Language Technologies domain and other applicative domains where language plays a critical role;
https://www.texta.ee/ TEXTA makes your company’s document archive searchable and the information easy to manage.
And just for fun, here are a couple computer-based language games: https://keeleressursid.ee/et/keelemangud
Sources: The respective websites and A&A Lingua participants’ notes from the ELRC seminar, 3 October 2018
A&A Lingua holds session with linguists from European Commission
20.07.2017On 2-3 March, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation held a seminar in Tallinn for its contract partners who provide translation into Estonian.
The seminar proceeded in a pleasant yet business-like atmosphere, where administrative matters related to translation were dealt with by the Head of the External Translation Unit, Werner Grünewald; the Acting Head of the Estonian Language Department, Epp Vihterpal; and two specialists from the External Translation Unit, Irene Haaranen and Catherine Pirard.
Main Terminologist Tiina Pai spoke on issues related to Estonian terminology and Translation Assistant Merle Milva gave an overview of technical problems that have come up in relation to the use of computer-assisted translation programs.
An entire set of topics was devoted to translation quality – Quality Officer Mai Lehtpuu provided us with both general guidelines and specific advice for maintaining and improving translation quality. Questions were answered and concerns were forwarded – it was a pleasure to attend!
A&A Lingua has been a translation partner for the European Commission since 2004. Last year, the European Commission translated about 650,000 pages into various languages; of this total, approximately 20,000 pages were translated into Estonian.
