In today’s blog we chat with SpinVox Language Manager Tamara Bermejo who provides insights on how Spanish language evolves in the SpinVox corpus.
First, tell us a little about yourself. What brought you to SpinVox?
My journey at SpinVox started in June 2006 when I joined to launch SpinVox’ first non-English language queue – Spanish of course! Flash forward to today (some three-and-a-half exhilarating years later!) and I would have to say I am excited by the contributions I’ve made on both the operational and technology fronts for what is the world’s leading voice-to-text service. It is pretty astounding to reflect that since joining the company I’ve helped build corpuses across a series of new and distinct languages, including; Spanish (plus its 10 Latin American Variants), Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Catalan.
Sounds like you have a very unique and interesting role at SpinVox. What’s a typical day in the life of a Language Manager?
One of the aspects of the job that keep it so interesting and motivating is that there is no such thing as a typical day at SpinVox! But generally speaking, I start the day by analyzing in-house metrics against detailed quality trend statistics and then use that information to create relevant action plans. The rest of the day my team will partner with other departments within SpinVox to discuss and review how we implement improvements to the product we deliver – as it is our mission to continuously strive not only to meet but to exceed our customers’ expectations.
As a Language Manager you have to keep your finger on the evolutionary pulse of Spanish language across slang, new pop culture terms, you name it. Whew! How do you keep up?
It’s ironic that as a Madrilena thanks to this job I’ve increased my knowledge of the Spanish language since I left Spain! I’m very lucky to manage an excellent quality control team who, like me, are passionate both about our product and the way language evolves. Watching the way language changes in such a relatively short amount of time is fascinating, and, thanks to their excellent quality control we ensure we’re up-to-date with the latest slang and vocabulary in all of the languages we support.
How many new words a week/month does your team add to the SpinVox corpus?
It depends on a number of different factors such as the volume of voice-to-text message traffic received, the maturity of the language, etc. When we launch a new language the size and quality of our dictionary is impressive from day one. But because of the fast-evolving nature of the spoken word we find we are adding new words to the language’s corpus right from the moment of launch. As the language becomes more mature in the system, new word additions will take place on a less frequent basis. But, as part of our language management process we also remove words that have become less relevant to speakers of the language – in with the new, out with the old as they say!
What are some of the most unusual words that you’ve come across in the last year? And do you find there is much crossover of Spanish language pop culture terms with English terms (such as credit crunch, etc.)?
It’s very difficult for me to choose a few words that represent the 11 Spanish speaking countries where our service in present today. However, we have observed that SpinVox has not escaped the effects of globalization as terms such as ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’, ‘Messenger’ and ‘Tamiflu’ have become very common words used in the last year. And we have found English terms (or what is known as ‘Spanglish’ – a cross between English and Spanish) continue to be steadily incorporated by our Latin American users.
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