Summer internship at Transperfect headquaters

This summer I was blessed with the opportunity to intern at TransPerfect at their global headquaters in New York. My interview with them was great and I was really excited for my first ever job in New York. I was hired as a web engineer intern from June to August!

Transpefect is a global translations company with over 83 offices around the world and working at its headquaters allowed me to learn more about the operations in an MNC. The firm has a fast-paced, energetic environment with people swooning into the office from all corners at New York every morning and working hard all day to work and co-ordinate with people all across the world. My division was called Onelink and we were a small team of engineers working together with Project Managers and Implementation Managers. A major chunk of our engineers are located in Serbia and beause of the time difference we could work together round the clock.

With clients like Disney, Citibank and Hilton we were always on are toes to keep our work up to date with changes on their origional websites.

The firm translates webpages, documents etc from english to various other languages like chineese, spanish , french etc. They use their own software to scan through various pages of a website and capture the content and the new words that need to be translated, this process is called "spidering".They have their own linux commands for the entire process of translation. I was trained to learn them and I used to work on a linux virtual machine on a windows platform.

After running the initial spider, the implementation managers or IM’s are ready with a budget based on the new words. If the client agrees we have an internal kickoff call and we spider once again, this time it is more detailed and generate txmls or segments of text so that it is easy for the linguists to translate them easily. After the segments were properly translated they were used on websites but the problem was that mostly css breaks. A “search” button for example after translation has longer text and it exceeds the button size. Debugging begins to fix css and html changes and create new .ini or configuration files.Also sometimes some content is not captured easily by the spider. It may be because either it’s a javascript or it requires some action to be performed by the user first for example clicking a submit button generates a pop up which says “Thank you.” We use something called as active monitoring to capture this kind of content. The company has its own servers which act as a proxy and helps when translated sites are requested. Based on the type of site and the clients request, the site may or may not be cached. The response time for cached site is obviously less but it is not always possible. For example it is not a good idea for a ecommerce site to be cached.

Initially I was responsible for debugging and handling content capturing. Recently I worked on a client LI-COR. The name of their site is www.licor.com. I spidered this and began the entire process of translation for a new client. I also did maintenance work for a few clients.

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