
Good communication is essential for businesses around the world, regardless of their specific domain, product, or geographic location. That’s why the accurate translation of online content in all formats is invaluable.
According to a report by the Economist, 44% of respondents say they’ve experienced a delay or a failure to complete a project due to poor communication. Meanwhile, 18% it has led to missed sales opportunities. And one of the best ways to improve communication is to make sure written content is accurately translated to remove language barriers. This can expose you to new business opportunities and be a catalyst for growth.
Budget cuts and stretched internal resources might not mean that’s always possible. However, artificial intelligence has been responsible for the optimization of many internal marketing processes, so what about language translation?
Can AI help with that?
The short answer is: Yes, it can!
AI translation, also known as machine translation, is an automatic translation method that relies on complex machine learning algorithms.
It uses neural networks, natural language processing, and algorithms to learn the meaning of words, understand context, and structure sentences in a way that is grammatically correct and feels natural to a reader.
Machine translation software is an AI-powered application that translates content automatically from one language to another, for example, from Portuguese to English or vice versa.
Today, machine translation tools no longer produce translated content that is clunky, unreliable, endearing due to its occasional misinterpretation of idioms, or even downright hilarious at times.
Thanks to the latest developments in AI technology, AI-translated content flows well, has solid grammar, and helps get the message across – in most instances, quite accurately. And the best part is that you won’t need to hire professional linguistic experts or interpreters when translating your content.
If you’re looking to expand globally, harnessing the power of AI translation will enable you to start selling your products or services to an international audience at a fraction of the time (and budget) you’d otherwise need.
For instance, machine translation helped eBay increase its sales by 10.9%, while The Bradery managed to streamline the translation of over 500 products daily and manage a tight launch schedule. All possible thanks to translation solutions.
Let’s look at its pros and cons to find out how AI translation can be helpful – and what limitations we need to be aware of.
Here are the pros of AI translation:
Let’s now look at some of the downsides of AI translation:
Let’s look at the ways in which AI translation can actually be beneficial to businesses. With the help of AI translation, your organization can:
The available machine translation methods are:
Most current AI translation software tools use either NMT (neural machine translation) or hybrid machine translation, in which two or more machine translation methods are combined to produce an accurate result.
A number of machine translation providers exist, such as DeepL, Amazon Translate, Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and ModernMT. These engines use neural machine translation. If you’re interested in taking a deep dive into an analysis of their performance, check out our report on the state of machine translation for websites.
However, NMT has reached a maturity level that makes comparisons between the different top-performing engines pretty tricky. As you can see in our report, they all provide a good quality, which naturally varies by language pairs.
AI translation is fit for translating website content at its current level of maturity – and will likely improve further in the next few years, positively impacting your translation process.
AI translation has many uses in business and can be extremely helpful in enabling growth and keeping costs low. Let’s see how businesses can leverage AI translation in different use-case scenarios.
Website translation is perhaps the most obvious use case for businesses – and also the most impactful way to use AI translation. Speaking the language of their customers becomes increasingly important for B2B and B2C businesses alike.
As early as 2014, 76% of English searches for tech products and services occurred outside of the US and Canada, meaning that global exposure today is an inevitable part of growth for many, if not most, businesses.
If a company wants to reach international customers, it’d need to translate its website into multiple languages. The easiest way to do this is via a machine translation software to translate the bulk of the content with the help of AI, proofread it (with the help of human translators), and publish it automatically once you’re happy with the result.
This type of technology gives you the ability to automate such a complex project as website translation. You then get the flexibility and editing control to output high-quality translations at the fraction of cost and time usually associated with such a project.
AI can be used to translate other types of content, as well. Some examples include:
Many companies are leveraging AI translation software to serve their customers in their own language, using an application to translate chat messages and emails automatically.
The same approach can be used for internal communication in large multinational companies, where teams from different locations need to communicate with each other easily.
So, how do you actually use AI translation to translate a website?
In short, you need to translate the bulk of the content via AI and have a human editor go through it afterward before publishing it on your website.
And, perhaps more importantly, it’s best to use a dedicated platform to streamline your workflow and simplify translation projects significantly. Weglot does exactly that, as it:
This significantly simplifies each translation project: You won’t need to copy and paste text manually in and out of your CMS or edit it in a separate document, and then ask your development team to upload it to your site.
Instead, you can manage everything in a single platform – and also take care of your technical SEO, too.
Sign up for a free trial or take our product tour (no signup required) and see how Weglot can help you translate your website effortlessly.