Amy Barter, a Transition Year Student from St. Josephs Mercy Navan spent this week learning about Machine Translation while on her TY Work Experience, 14 – 18 November 2016. We were delighted to have her in the office and really appreciated all her great help. She even had some time to blog about her experience.
My name is Amy Barter and I am doing transition year in St. Josephs Mercy Navan. This week I decided that I wanted to pursue my first week of Work Experience in a company called KantanMT in DCU. KantanMT is a Machine Translation company that provides for some major companies all over the world. They can translate thousands of words per day and millions per week. Machine translation, as you can imagine, is much faster than human translation. KantanMT provides a quick and easy to use service that accurately translates words, segments and documents from one language to another.
What is Transition year?
Transition year is an optional year to take in the middle of secondary school at the age of 15/16. In this year, you do various activities, which you might not get a chance to do in other years. It’s a year where your meant to mature, grow up and learn more about yourself. The one thing I need to learn about myself is what I want to be when I am older. The transition year (TY) work experience helps me to try different careers and understand what I like and what I don’t like.
Why KantanMT?
I chose to look for work experience in an office based company involved in IT because that’s what I had an interest in. KantanMT was perfect. I went in with an open, mind not having a clue on what I would be doing for the week. I wanted to get a feel of what a real work environment felt like and I thought KantanMT was very interesting.
Being my first time going into a business or company, I was very scared and nervous. I didn’t know what to expect but to my delight everyone in the office was so nice and I didn’t feel anxious or nervous after the first day there.
What did I do?
This week was full of new opportunities and experiences. Firstly, I was given a brief overview/demo on how the KantanMT worked and how customers use it. I helped add loads of contacts from the Tekom Trade Fair in Germany to their database. I helped edit the content for their new website, which was quite difficult, but I got a lot of help. I looked through recent events in the KantanMT calendar and wrote up posts for their social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
What did I learn?
I learnt much more than I had expected to learn in just one week. By the end of the week I knew what Machine Translation was, and what it involved. I had an idea of how to create and engine and train software to translate segments or a text. I felt like I knew what it felt like to work in an office and at a computer. I’d love to know much more about machine translations now and IT.
What did I take away from this experience?
I got a feel of what it’s like to work in an office and enjoyed it a lot. I learned so much about IT and its massive range of possibilities.
– Amy Barter
Thank you for your lovely card, Amy, and wish you a very happy and bright future.