Intento is a remarkable Studio plugin which gives you easy access to more than twenty MT providers. It’s use is not free (see below), but the charges are very reasonable.

Confidentiality

This is what is said in “Exhibit E” of the license agreement:

“We have two types of requests (from Customer to Intento and from Intento to Third-Party Services), and four types of Customer Data: request metadata, input data (request payload), user credentials (to external services, if necessary), and the data processing results (e.g. translated text or tags extracted from an image).” And: “The request metadata is everything contained in the request except input data and credentials, plus metadata derived from the payload.” These data may be deleted by user request.

Input data (source text) is stored for milliseconds from the reception of the request and submission to the MT provider. The same applies to the reception of the target text and the submission to the client.

But of course you also have to check the MT provider’s confidentiality terms to make sure that they fulfil your needs.

Account

To create an account, click Sign in and the follow the simple procedure. Once you have an account, you have access to all the necessary information at the Console Dashboard – in particular your API key for Production. (The Sandbox option – which is free – is not really for translation but for testing of the API integration.) You will need that key every time you make a new project setting using Intento, because unfortunately it is not possible to save it in the project settings. (Maybe in the future?)

Project Settings

The Intento Studio plugin is available both from the AppStore and from the Intento shared folder; the latter may be in a later development stage since the former needs reviewing by SDL before publishing. (Curiously, none of them appear on the Add-Ins > Plugins list and only the shared folder one appears in the Sdl Plugin Management window.

In Studio, open the Project Settings and then appropriate Translated Memory and Automated Translation settings. Then (as usual) click Use. The Intento MT Hub plugin is shown on the list as Intento MT Translation Provider; the other one is called Intento MT Provider. They open the following settings windows with the former first:

In both cases you must enter the API key I mentioned above and click the Check button. You need to do this every time you open this window; the key is not retained.

Once the key is approved, the Provider list is available. For some of the providers you can use your own credentials, which means that the charge will be made directly by that provider – otherwise Intento will charge on behalf of the provider. The “custom model” is applicable if you have your own customized MT model with the provider in question. “Payload Logging for 30 min” is meant for clients who may need logging (the default mode is “no trace”) in case there are issues to resolve.

Smart routing

Smart routing means that Intento makes the choice of MT provider for you, based on the latest Intento MT Benchmark. The price will be less than USD25 per 1M characters, and “full data protection” is provided, as well as high reliability.

Prices

There is ample information on prices in the license agreement (“Exhibits” A, C, and D), but you probably want to know before even starting the procedure of creating an account or setting up a project. Here is a brief overview. You will be charged for both Intento’s and the MT provider’s services.

Intento’s prices are as follows:

You pay per month or when the accumulated fee equals USD 5000.

For 1M characters – probably at least 100,000 words in a European language, except Finnish – I must say I could easily afford USD5.

MT providers’ prices are “Retail Recommended Prices for Third Party Services”, i.e. what you pay if you use that provider directly. This means that the charges for the MT provider services are the same whether you let Intento charge for them or you use your own credentials in the setup.

So there you have it. Apart from the question marks as concerns user information, I think this is an excellent service.