TAUS launches Transcreation certification program at UTA

Tuesday, Jul 14, 2020

TAUS, the language data network, will launch its new certification program in Transcreation at UTA this fall. Students in Pete Smith and Blake Carpenter's Localization and Translation course will be the first university cohort in the world to complete the program.

UTA’s Localization and Translation program trains students how to combine language, culture, and technology to adapt texts, products, software, and websites to a target language and culture. Students in the program build AI machine translation engines to adapt communications into seven languages. But a translation, without proper attention to cultural context, could become meaningless. That’s where Transcreation comes in. Transcreation goes beyond simple translation and empowers the translator to establish an authentic connection to the target culture through creative writing techniques.

“Transcreation is one of the most significant emerging roles in the translation and language industries,” said Pete Smith, director of the Localization and Translation program in the Department of Modern Languages. “In the 21^st century, translators will be seen as having deep cultural knowledge and creativity, which can be tapped for the broader task of communicating more comprehensively and respectfully across cultures globally.”

“Transcreation allows the translator to be creative, giving them maximum flexibility to provide content to target markets,” said Blake Carpenter, co-instructor of Localization and Translation and the first person in the world to test the course and give feedback to TAUS developers. “The Transcreation course by TAUS provides hands-on experience, allowing the participant to apply the concepts of transcreation to real-world scenarios.”

Upon completion of the Transcreation program, students will earn a certificate in this emerging discipline, making them competitive candidates for internships and job opportunities in the Localization industry. Today Localization is a $55 billion business around the world, and set to grow 2-3% annually even in this time of global market recession.

“For the past six years TAUS has worked closely with the University of Texas at Arlington to bridge the gap between business and academia on topics such as machine translation and transcreation,” said TAUS executive Anne-Maj van der Meer. “Together with UTA, TAUS is making great strides in bringing the language business and academia together.”

TAUS provides language data, translation performance metrics, knowledge and networking opportunities to over 12,000 people across global enterprises, language service providers, government organizations, and academia.

Smith and Carpenter coordinate many partnerships with industry leaders to train UTA's Localization and Translation students in real-world scenarios. In the second semester of their training, students work with KantanMT, an international software provider, to build AI translation machines that they test against global products such as Google Translate. The program also partners with Memsource, a leading Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool to provide students hands-on experience with industry software.