Stepes (pronounced ) is an online

translation Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...

and

localization Localization or localisation may refer to: Biology * Localization of function, locating psychological functions in the brain or nervous system; see Linguistic intelligence * Localization of sensation, ability to tell what part of the body is a ...

service which pairs a business in need of translation with professional translators in over 100 languages. The company was founded in San Francisco, California, in December 2015 and introduced the world's first chat-based mobile translation technology. The Stepes platform is powered by an AI-enabled Translation Management System with

cloud-based Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multip ...

translation memory searches, continuous terminology management, and workflow automation. It can match in various industry and domain fields and works with a variety of

content format A content format is an encoded format for converting a specific type of data to displayable information. Content formats are used in recording and transmission to prepare data for observation or interpretation. This includes both analog and dig ...

s like documents, videos, websites, and software.

Development

Stepes was developed in conjunction with CSOFT International, a localization company with headquarters in

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...

and

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. Stepes founder, Carl Yao, is also the creator of

TermWiki TermWiki.com (pronounced ) is a major social learning network that allows users to learn, discover, share, and store personal terms and glossaries in 1487 domains in 97 languages. The site emphasizes collaboration, with a forum, a question/answer ...

, a social knowledge network for industry and domain terminology in 100 languages. The name "Stepes" is a reference to the

Eurasian steppes The Eurasian Steppe, also simply called the Great Steppe or the steppes, is the vast steppe ecoregion of Eurasia in the temperate grasslands, savannas and shrublands biome. It stretches through Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova and Transnistria ...

, from which the majority of the world's current spoken languages originated. The software was launched online in early December 2015 with

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

and Android apps launched later. In May 2016, Stepes launched Stepes Translate, an online human translation interface that resembles

Google Translate Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an API t ...

but is powered by human translators.

Chat-based translation

Chat-based translation describes the way Stepes feeds content to be translated to its translators on a smaller mobile screen. The Stepes mobile app breaks down longer documents into smaller chunks and sends them to the translator in the form of a text. Translators respond back with their translation, resulting in a back-and-forth "chat" which the Stepes app automatically compiles into a full translated document. Translators can also swipe left or right to view the full translated text or the full original text. Stepes holds multiple patents in the US and in China for its chat-based translation interface, swipe left and right for context review and software.

Stepes Translate

Stepes Live uses a traditional side by side

interface Interface or interfacing may refer to: Academic journals * ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society * ''Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics'' * '' Inte ...

of machine translation platforms like

. Users enter text into the source field which is translated by a human translator through the Stepes mobile app. Requesting users can see their translation progress live. For most requests, the translation is completed within minutes and appears in the target field for the requesting user to see.

Mobile translation approach

Mobile translation is the process for human translators to translate content directly on their mobile devices. Stepes uses only human translators (rather than machine translation) to translate content. In this modality, translations are done through a

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

using the Stepes mobile translation app or through Stepes' browser-based application. The result is that translators can work from both desktop and mobile devices. As of 2014, there were only around 250,000 professional translators but 3.65 billion bilingual people in the world. Stepes currently has a network of 60,000 translators. Language industry experts have called mobile translation the beginning of "Big Translation, large-scale translation efforts by people speaking two or more languages." Big Translation requires leveraging existing technological tools to scale up translation capabilities to a global level that matches current communication and information generation needs.

References

External links