Word-Level Translation Alignment
Customer Story 01 · Machine Translation and Localization DataThe Challenge:
A frontier AI company building next-generation translation wanted its system to learn which word in one language matches which word in another, and just as important, when there is no real match at all. "Wasser" and "पानी" (water) line up easily. But the German "Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof" (literally "I only understand train station") becomes "मेरे सिर के ऊपर से निकल गया" (it went over my head) in Hindi. The translation is right, yet no word matches a word. The work covered 23 uncommon language pairs, including German to Hindi and Russian to Chinese, where finding one person fluent in both languages is very hard.
Effective Solution:
Volga's linguists linked every word to its match and rated each link: confident, somewhat unsure, or not confident. Idioms were treated as one unit, and words with no counterpart were never forced into a match. To start, two native experts, one per language, worked together on live calls. Volga then found and trained single experts fluent in both languages, so each pair could be handled by one person with the same quality.
Results:
Volga solved a hiring problem most teams would have given up on, and delivered in 2-3 weeks.