What Business Leaders Must Know About AI Localization

Every business wants to win the attention game, and localization can help you get there.

The figures are clear – 40% of consumers simply won’t buy from a site that doesn’t offer their language. On the flipside, localization can help you avoid expensive mistakes like those made by HSBC in 2009. The brand’s ‘Assume Nothing’ slogan was mistranslated to ‘Do Nothing’ in certain countries, costing a $10 million rebrand.

Today, AI-powered localization could have saved HSBC from that expensive blunder. AI translation tools now catch context, tone, and cultural quirks faster than ever before. But there’s still a tug-of-war between the speed of AI and the nuance that only humans bring to the table. So, how to get the best of both worlds without risking your brand’s voice?

We’ve created this guide to give you all the answers you need. You’ll get the lowdown on how AI localization works, its differences from old-school methods, and where it shines and stumbles.

We’ll dig into the business benefits, the real challenges, and practical steps to get started. You’ll also find out how website translation tool Weglot is making AI-powered localization simple – even for the nontech-minded.

Key takeaways

• AI localization enables much faster timescales than traditional methods.
• Quality still demands human review, especially for cultural nuances.
• Cost savings are a huge benefit, enabling growth without the need for multiple new hires.
• Data privacy and language limitations remain key challenges for any team.
• The Weglot tool simplifies multilingual site launches, even for non-technical teams.

How AI Differs from Traditional Localization

Traditional localization has always relied on skilled human translators. They adapt every word and phrase, ensuring content feels natural in each market. This approach is thorough, but slow and expensive. Translating a site or web app can take weeks, and costs quickly add up, especially if your project is a large one!

AI localization changes everything. Artificial intelligence can translate thousands of words in seconds, not days. It keeps terminology and style consistent across every page, which is tough for even the best human teams. And the cost difference is huge. AI solutions allow you to localize at a fraction of the usual price.

And quality is no longer a concern. Modern systems use neural networks that understand context, not just words. They spot cultural references and adapt tone, making for consistent translations across a site.

This greatly reduces the need for human intervention, although translators should still form a  part of your overall translation workflow. With the right AI tool onside, translators can act as cultural consultants and quality controllers. Instead of working on 1000s of words at a time, they can simply review and fine-tune your AI output, making sure nothing gets lost in translation.

A perfect blend of AI and human expertise means businesses get faster, more affordable localization, without sacrificing quality or cultural fit.

AI vs Machine Translation

The terms ‘AI’ and ‘machine translation’ are often used interchangeably, but there are major differences in reality.

Machine Translation (MT) started out by capturing the basics. Early systems used fixed rules or simple statistics to swap words from one language to another. The result was clunky, word-for-word translations that often sounded awkward or missed the point entirely.

Modern MT systems are unrecognizable from those early models. The best models, such as DeepL or Google Translate, use algorithms to translate text, identifying patterns in large language datasets. Weglot uses these providers to give you the most accurate output that can later be manually edited through a front-end Visual Editor if required.

Now, just to confuse things, you may see MT referred to as ‘AI translation’, and that’s fine. MT is a form of AI translation, so falls under this broader term. The real differences are found between MT/AI and ‘genAI’ models. ‘Generative AI’ is highly distinct from traditional MT.

GenAI uses advanced artificial intelligence to better understand content and cultural nuances. It uses natural language processing to understand context, tone, and even humor. AI translation can generate human-like, brand-appropriate translations that learn from your feedback.

Want a more playful tone? Not a problem. Just ask and it will redo the translation in seconds. Examples of genAI translation include Open AI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini.

Instead of making literal translations, genAI delivers content that reads naturally and makes sense to local audiences. It’s not perfect, but it’s a huge leap. Generative AI translation is now smart enough to avoid its old blunders, and it can sometimes catch subtleties a human might miss.

Weglot uses both. Your website is first translated thanks to AI translation providers and you can then choose to activate our built-in  AI language model. This learns from your website’s tone of voice, glossary of terms, and continued manual edits to provide a hands-off way to further increase the accuracy of your translations.  

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Benefits of Using AI Localization for Your Business

A website that speaks only one language can result in a brand missing out on thousands of potential customers. Here’s what’s at stake:

• Cost savings: AI localization can reduce translation costs by 90% compared to traditional methods. That means you can reinvest those savings into marketing, product development, or customer support – areas that inspire growth.
• Faster time to market: AI takes localization timelines from weeks down to hours. This speed lets you launch products in multiple countries at once, react quickly to trends, and stay ahead of competitors.
• Scalability for market expansion: Want to enter five new markets this year? Or ten? AI localization makes it possible. You can adapt your content for dozens of languages without multiplying your costs or workload. Growing globally no longer means growing your translation team at the same pace.
• Efficiency improvements: AI automates repetitive tasks, freeing up your team to focus on high-impact work. Routine content gets handled in seconds, while your human experts spend their time fine-tuning words and phrases.
• Productivity enhancements: AI tools support human translators with features like translation memory and consistent terminology. This reduces duplicate work and boosts collaboration. For more info, our guide to translation quality gives an in-depth look at Weglot’s translation process.
• Global reach: AI localization opens doors to markets you couldn’t reach before. And it matters – 76% of consumers prefer to buy products in their native language. If your content isn’t speaking to them, they’ll simply buy from someone else.

Challenges of Using AI for Localization

AI localization offers huge potential, but it isn’t a magic fix for every business. The more complex your needs, the more challenges you’ll need to plan for:

Low-Resource Languages

AI shines with popular languages like English, Spanish, or French. But for languages with less training data, like Swahili or Urdu, translation quality drops. Businesses targeting these markets may see uneven results, so it’s important to review outputs with care.

Data Privacy Concerns

If you’re using third-party AI translation tools alone, be mindful that they often process content in the cloud. This raises questions about where your data goes and who can access it. Sensitive business information or intellectual property could be at risk if not handled properly.

GDPR Compliance

If you operate in Europe, GDPR compliance is non-negotiable. AI tools must respect rules around data storage, user consent, and the right to be forgotten. Managing these requirements across multiple languages and platforms can quickly get complex, so factor this into your strategy at the very beginning.

Context Understanding Challenges

AI isn’t perfect with context. It can fumble industry jargon or misinterpret phrases with double meanings. For example, using the word ‘kick-off’ in a business context might get translated as a soccer term, leading to confusion or embarrassment.

Cultural Sensitivity Issues

AI may miss subtle cultural cues or taboos that a human would catch. This can result in content that feels irrelevant or even offensive in new markets, putting your brand reputation on the line if you haven’t got the right checks in place.

Human Oversight Necessity

No matter how advanced AI becomes, certain brands may always want to involve human translators at some point in the process to review, correct, and adapt content for local audiences.

Scale Your Global Business with Weglot

Weglot is a website translation tool built for businesses that want to scale globally, with a hands-off approach at the forefront. With instant translations for over 110 languages, it combines the speed of AI-powered translation with the accuracy of human editing, giving you the best of both worlds.

Unlike traditional solutions, Weglot works with any website technology, so no development work is needed. You can integrate and get set up in less than 10 minutes, so even non-tech team members can launch multilingual sites fast.

Managing translations is easy with Weglot’s centralized dashboard. You can see every translation in context, edit on the fly, and assign roles for team collaboration. This helps you handle tricky context or cultural nuances, and keeps your brand voice consistent everywhere.

Data privacy and compliance are also handled. Weglot is GDPR and SOC 2 compliant, with EU-based servers and strict privacy controls. Our tool also takes care of many of the complex parts of multilingual SEO.

It automatically creates language-specific subdomains or subdirectories, adds hreflang tags, and translates your metadata to help your site rank on foreign search engines.

Take REVIEWS.io for example. By switching from manual translation to Weglot, they automated their blog translations, reduced human error, and saw a 120% increase in German traffic, plus a 20% jump in conversions.

With over 110,000 brands trusting Weglot, it’s clear how our translation management software can help businesses grow globally, minus the usual barriers.

Weglot and AI

We’ve also launched a genAI language model into the Weglot product. Instead of relying only on MT-based AI translation, our AI language model uses advanced generative AI models like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to deliver more human-like translations.

The model learns from your brand’s tone of voice, audience, and even your predefined glossary rules, for even more brand-centric and nuanced translations that cut down on editing time in the future.

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Best Practices for Utilizing AI

The smartest businesses treat AI as a partner, not a replacement. Here’s how to get the most from AI localization:

• Choose the right tools: Look for platforms that support your language pairs, work with your website setup, and let you customize translations. As we’ve seen, solutions like Weglot offer AI translation and an AI language model, as well as human editing, so you don’t have to choose between speed and quality.

You can even edit text straight to the page, to ensure your translated content fits your existing designs. This is useful for Right-to-Left (RTL) languages or those that translate to a longer word count.

Weglot’s Visual Editor

• Use a glossary and style guide: Build a database of key terms and brand guidelines. This helps AI learn your company’s voice and ensures consistency across every language. The best AI software comes with its own glossary and Weglot allows you to add word preferences and translation rules for site-wide consistency.

Weglot’s translation glossary

• Review with human translators: Incorporating human review to certain key pages helps the AI improve and builds a more accurate glossary for future projects.
• Get feedback from local audiences: Use surveys, user testing, or analytics to see how your localized content performs. Real-world feedback helps you spot issues and adapt quickly.
• Continuously monitor and refine: Treat localization as a living process. Regularly review translations, update glossaries, and tweak your approach as your business grows.

Take the Next Step in AI Localization with Weglot

AI localization brings speed, cost savings, and the ability to scale into new markets faster than ever before, changing how global businesses grow.

Weglot, powered by AI translation, allows you to translate your website instantly, then lets you fine-tune every detail with human review and/or our genAI language model.

Weglot works with any website technology, so you don’t need a developer to get started. And you can literally launch a multilingual site in minutes!

Experience how fast it can be to have a multilingual website up and running by trying our 14-day free trial.