Language Translation

JONCKERS has more than 25 years of experience in the language industry. The company continues to innovate disruptive solutions to provide quality translation and localization services. In the last five years, JONCKERS has invested heavily in a new AI-driven platform combining machine and human, and is focused on enabling continuous translation delivery on a large scale. With offices in 10 locations across 3 continents, the company ensures a local customer service on a global scale. 

JONCKERS’ mission is to remove language as a barrier through its AI-enabled platform and a managed multilingual community. The company’s AI-powered platform combines the efficiency of the machine with human intelligence and helps companies to become extremely fast and efficient in their localization processes. JONCKERS is also helping global enterprises to move away from step-by-step translation to a continuous publishing workflow. 

JONCKERS’ solutions are especially suitable for SMEs and enterprise customers from the eCommerce, IT, Travel, Manufacturing and Automotive Industries. They typically have high-volume content that requires agile and continuous translation/publishing in many languages. 

JONCKERS also takes its corporate responsibility very seriously, providing multilingual work opportunities to people around the world. The company's AI platform enables talent to work remotely and flexibly, without having to invest in software tools. This flexibility empowers talent from anywhere in the world to engage with the company as flex-workers. 

 

A Trailblazing Leader 

Silke Zschweigert recently became the new CEO of JONCKERS. Since joining the company in September 2019, Silke has been focussed on developing the future vision for the company’s platform and the multilingual community, to maximize the return on investment for enterprises going global. She has extensive experience in leadership roles, having previously worked as Executive Vice President and Chief Delivery Officer at SDL for many years. 

Silke enjoys creating momentum through a reasoned logical and positive approach. She is an energetic, tenacious, personable and open leader. Silke leads with an open communication style and discovers skills and talents in others to get the best out of them. She is also a strong relationship builder using a collaborative leadership style. 

Silke holds a Master’s in translations for Dutch, English, German and Chinese, as well as worked in China for a year, before starting in the language industry as a project manager when she was 23 years old. Very soon she took on a team lead and at 27 years old, she became the General Manager of SDL Germany with then 100 employees. Silke’s roles continued to grow and remained the part of SDL’s executive team when the company was looking at its global language services business in 38 countries with over 2,500 employees. After leaving SDL in 2018, Silke took a break and worked as a consultant for non-language related businesses. Later on, she was contacted by LSPs and private equity companies interested in the language domain that ultimately brought Silke back to the industry. 

At JONCKERS, Silke is very excited, as the company has transitioned from being a pure language service provider to an AI-driven Language Platform with a multilingual community. She looks forward to scaling this capability and further developing advanced solutions creating significant value for enterprises going global. 

 

Optimizing Industry with Innovative Strategies 

JONCKERS’ solutions are driven by market dynamics and requirements. The internet has given the company all access to more content than ever before and global consumers are accessing this content and buying products when available in their own language. However, budgets and time are limited, which means most businesses need to carefully decide which markets to enter first and plan gradually. JONCKERS always asks its customers, “What if they could be in all markets at the same time?” 

With its platform and industry experience, Silke believes that JONCKERS has the potential to grow exponentially by onboarding more customers, additional LSPs, and more language talents onto the platform. Despite its competitive pricing, the company is able to achieve healthy margins. This remains a focus as it is also important for JONCKERS’ future growth and continuous investment in innovation and technology. 

Silke is a firm believer in having a diversified workforce as it leads to creativity and success. One aspect of diversity is to encourage women to take leadership roles. In the language industry, it is quite typical to have a high percentage of women in the workforce. She says, “Once you get to a technology environment like ours, it gets more difficult and it is still unusual for women to take on a management role. We are happy that more than 55% of our mid-management level is female. In our higher management, we have 4 women including myself as CEO so there is still room for expansion here.” 

JONCKERS’ innovative policies of unlimited holidays and remote working enable its staff (not only the women) to be more flexible and enjoy a better work-life balance, thereby increasing employee loyalty and overall job satisfaction. And this is not restricted to just the company’s internal employees, providing people with development possibilities is also important for its multilingual freelance community. 

 

Delivering Quality Translation at Scale 

JONCKERS’ AI-empowered platform WordsOnline enables businesses to go global smarter. The platform helps customers who need translations at scale, delivering up to one million words per day. In customer service translations, the company’s priority customers can see reviewed content within minutes to ensure timely customer responses. 

Today, customers have full visibility over their translations. Traditional step-by-step translations were akin to working with a BlackBox where users sent off their translations and hoped that they would come back on time and meet their quality expectations. However, that system required a leap of faith from customers. 

On the contrary, WordsOnline gains customers’ trust immediately, as they can see what has been uploaded and can monitor the speed of translations, progress and deadline adherence. It is particularly suited for SMEs and enterprises with high volumes of quality content, especially in industries like eCommerce, travel, IT and Manufacturing, where continuous publishing is crucial. 

With WordsOnline, translation happens continuously and the quality of the translation is reviewed instantaneously rather than waiting for a first draft to be complete. This allows JONCKERS to directly train and educate the linguists by providing instant feedback as they progress through the project, so that they can gain immediate improvements and training. 

Even since its inception five years ago, WordsOnline was ahead of its time in applying TM technology and MT engines and presenting the output online to the resource for post-editing. In the past four years, JONCKERS has further automated and optimized its service, business intelligence and the training and onboarding of thousands of linguists from around the world. WordsOnline has transformed the translation process, combing over 25 years of experience with cutting-edge technology to deliver an innovative, efficient approach to translation.  

WordsOnline combines Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Translation Memory technology with an AI-empowered translation community. At the core of all of this lies the automated risk-based quality algorithms that optimize the quality processes. This innovative process allows JONCKERS to streamline, automate and deliver high-quality translations at scale. 

Leveraging Disruptive Technologies to Drive Innovation 

WordsOnline was originally developed through a business need. JONCKERS had to translate millions of words within a very short timeframe at a high-quality rate. This required automation and a professional quality system. These requirements were the key drivers for what has been developed to date. 

JONCKERS keeps innovating and establishing partnerships with innovative businesses. In partnership with its clients, the company is currently piloting their new Predictive Quality Module (MTQE). This AI algorithm predicts what the quality levels of the raw translations will be without post-editing. Further, this feature will enable customers to “lock” high-quality segments and only focus on the parts that need attention. This could be very disruptive for the industry since it could enable customers to publish a lot more content in more languages for the same budget. 

 

Personalized Solutions to Win Challenges 

Today, content is often managed in different repositories, across multiple departments with disconnected translation processes which makes it very cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive. That is why organizations move away from a step-by-step process to a continuous publishing and localization approach that is automated, data-driven, continuous with a fully integrated language community. 

WordsOnline tackles these challenges and works as a unique end-to-end localization platform that manages all translations for any type of content in any language across any media. As it combines Neural Machine Translation, Translation Memory technology and translation community, WordsOnline provides control, transparency and scalability whilst automating the complete localization process. 

By combining the strength of machine translation and the talents of JONCKERS’ human community, everyone can go global faster and be in all markets at the same time. 

 

Business Excellence and Awards 

Despite not focussed a lot on participating in awards, certifications or external recognitions, JONCKERS has received numerous honors. The company has been named the Fastest Growing 20 Software Companies by Silicon Review, as well as voted for best Outsourcing Vendor for Testing Services by Outsourcing Gazette. JONCKERS is also the two-time Stevie Award Winner for excellent services. 

In addition to these, the company is being appreciated by its customers, its language community and its employees. JONCKERS is highly acknowledged for its effective customer and employee satisfaction. Its WordsOnline solution has been recommended by 77% of users, while 90% want to take more projects on it.     

 

The Future of Translation Industry 

Silke foresees the translation industry to evolve more over the next five years. It will continue to grow as content continues to soar and translations are needed to enable global sales. This will change the way content gets translated. With constant quality improvements in Neural Machine Translation, the implementation of MTQE (Machine Translation Quality Estimation), powerful combination of man and machine is becoming the de-facto standard for a lot of content. 

According to Silke, the language industry is very fragmented with the top 100 companies barely covering 15% of the market. This means that it is ideal for consolidation and the ones who will be able to consolidate will offer a strong and scalable technology platform. The role of the human remains extremely important since the human language experts will be the ones adding value. Therefore, having a great platform for this community that enables them to work flexibly, efficiently, productively and in a fun environment will be a great differentiator. The role of the post-editor is like the diamond cutters – they take a raw stone and turn it into a valuable round diamond.