Articles and Stories

April 30, 2015

By Sabina Wrightsman

Because World Translation Center specializes in writing programming notes for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and has the expertise to record flawless prompts, a client sent a script for an IVR system for translation into various languages.

Each IVR script is divided into three segments:

1. the system prompts for dates, times as well as the basic words needed;
2. full sentences and
3. a set of sentences unique for each client.

After the translation is complete, the script is recorded by professional voice talents and set up in the computer with instructions on when to play which prompt so that the recorded pieces then form complete sentences.

The English language is simple when compared to other languages as English does not differentiate between genders and nouns do not have different endings when their usage is different.

There are not only different genders in other languages (masculine, feminine or neuter); in Russian, for example, each and every noun, adjective and number changes with the position of that word in the sentence (subject, direct object, indirect object, object of preposition etc.).

Here is one example of how complicated the Lithuanian translation of the single word ‘cents’ can be:

Similar to Russian, Lithuanian uses three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter;

There are seven cases of nouns, which are reflected by different endings. The word ‘cents’ requires seven different translations:

Centas, cento, centui, centą, centu, cente, centai.

Before starting the translation it is important to know how the sentence fragments are used by knowing what precedes and what follows each prompt, how dates and times are spoken and how numbers are used, so that engineering notes can be written to help the programmer understand how to program the system so that the final concatenated sentences come out grammatically correct.

The foregoing examples demonstrate, other languages might require additional prompts to make a system work correctly in the target country. Before proceeding with the recording, we always do a source analysis to understand all concatenation options to make sure that all variables are included for the recording as often additional prompts must be created for the target market.

IVR translations require flawless recordings by professional native voice talents. Because the computer uses the wav files to combine them into a full sentence, the intonations have to match the place in the sentence exactly. You do not want a word that sounds like it belongs at the end of a sentence to be placed at the beginning or middle of a sentence. Therefore many prompts, especially numbers, require three different recordings with the intonation at the beginning, in the middle and at the end.