
In this post, we go into the results of a recent survey we conducted on the state of machine translation. Simply put, we wanted to know: how accurate is machine translation? Can you rely on software solely for your projects, or will you always need the human touch of professional translators?
The short answer is simple: machine translation is very good (with most translations only needing light edits), but whether or not you need human review depends on the content you’re translating and the overall scope of your project.
After we take a look at the quality of machine translation, we also go over a detailed walk-through on how you can set up Weglot, our website translation software, with any CMS and start translating your content today.
Note: Ready to translate your website? Skip the article and start your free trial.
First, a quick definition – machine translation is the process of using software to translate content. This content can be anything from website copy to subtitles for videos to user manuals.
And to be even more specific, we’re looking at the efficacy of neural machine translation (NMT). The neural part is important –NMTs are translation tools that constantly improve the quality of their translations over time. This means they adapt their translations in the future based on what they’ve translated in the past.
There are two big reasons to consider using machine translation over a human translator.
But both reasons fall short if the translated content you’re getting is riddled with errors.
So the question is, how accurate is neural machine translation? And is it the right translation method for your project?
To answer this, we had professional translators take a look at content translated by various machine translation providers, including:
The editors were asked to rate the translations as:
Translators were tasked with rating how accurate the translations were to the spirit of the text, not just providing a literal translation.
When we looked at the average rating across all of these providers we learned that most machine translations were acceptable. FYI: An “acceptable” rating here meant that while some content needed editing, the corrections were mostly light adjustments.
We also learned that different translation providers offer varying levels of accuracy, depending on which language they were translating.
For example, you can see that professional translators made fewer changes to German translations when they were working with Amazon Translate, Microsoft Translate, and Google Translate.
Note: Weglot maintains active API connections with 3 leading translation providers. This way we can always use the best option to translate your site.
In short, this study shows that machine translation is an attractive option for all translation projects, though how you use machine translation may vary.
For some projects, it can be sufficient just to let machine translation translate your content and not bother with manual reviews (at Weglot, roughly ⅔ of our customers don’t edit their machine-translated content). For other projects, you can use machine translation to provide you with a first layer of translated content.
Then you can have editors spot-check or review those translations.
This two-layer process is faster and more affordable than just using human translators.
Below, we look at how using this two-layer approach would work if you’re translating a website.
Note: In this post, we do focus exclusively on translating website content. If you need to translate a mobile app, video subtitles, or off-website content, then you’ll want to look at using a translation tool – like DeepL – or a translation agency.
In this section, we look at how you can use Weglot to handle your machine translation.
Weglot has active API connections to these leading translation providers:
So by using Weglot, you’re getting machine translation from the best tools in the business, without having to fuss with extracting or uploading your files. You just add Weglot to your website. Weglot works with any website, and here’s a short video showing how simple it is to set it up.
After adding Weglot to your site, you pick which language(s) you want your site translated into. We currently offer over 110 different languages, including right-to-left languages like Arabic and custom languages like Canadian-French.
Weglot will start translating your site immediately thanks to the automatic translation feature. For most sites, this entire process takes just a few minutes. You also have the option of customizing which content gets translated – for example, you can exclude specific URLs from the translation process or even sections/blocks within a page.
Once your translation is done – again, this typically takes a few minutes – Weglot will host your newly translated site under a subdomain/subdirectory of your existing site. For example, one of our customers is New Balance in Saudi Arabia.
Here’s their English site and domain.
Here’s their Arabic site and domain:
Take a look at how seamless the change is from left-to-right orientation to right-to-left orientation. All of that is done by Weglot, simplifying the entire localization process for your website.
By connecting your site with leading translation providers, and allowing you to customize what gets translated and how your language switcher lookers, Weglot lets you use highly accurate translation to quickly create a multilingual site.
If you’re ready to start translating your content, start your free trial today.
Or keep reading to learn how you can access and edit your translations and other key benefits of using Weglot.
We looked at how effective and accurate machine translation is – but plenty of businesses (about ⅓ of our customer base) still choose to make edits to their translations.
These edits could be for accuracy (as discussed, machine translation is very accurate, but not infallible). You may also want to make edits for tone, or to make sure your translated content fits nicely within their website’s layout and overall design.
That’s why Weglot makes it easy for you to access and edit your translations.
With Weglot, you can:
When you log into Weglot, you can access your translations from your dashboard.
On your dashboard, you can:
You can find specific translations by looking up the URL or typing in the phrase or word you want to find.
Or you can use our Visual Editor. When you use our Visual Editor, you see a live version of your site’s front end. You can easily navigate over your website and makes edits to your site’s content.
Our Visual Editor is a great way to avoid issues like overlapping text or broken design.
You can either use Weglot’s platform with your team of translators, where they log in, access the translations, and make their edits. Or, if you don’t have a team of translators that can help with your manual translations, you can order professional translation services directly through Weglot:
Simply pick which translations you want to be reviewed by a professional translator and pay for your order. Your order will be completed within 2 business days, and your site will be updated with the newest translation.
Note; Because you’re using a base layer of machine-translated content, it’s going to be a faster review process for your translators. This saves you time and money.
There are two extra benefits to using Weglot to translate your website’s content.
With Weglot, your translated site exists as a subdomain or subdirectory of your main site. It’s an extension of your main site.
When changes are made on your main site, they will be automatically reflected on your translated site.
For example, if you run an eCommerce store in English and have translated your site into French and German. When you add new products – or revise your product pages – your French and German sites are automatically updated. Any updates and changes you make are then continuously synced so there’s no worry of displaying untranslated content.
Weglot’s translation management platform also helps your translated sites with search engine optimization (SEO).
Weglot will automatically:
In this post, we looked at the efficacy of machine translation. While exact results will vary, depending on factors such as translation providers and what languages are being translated, the overwhelming consensus is that machine translation can translate content and only require minimal edits.
This is a major win for your business if you want to translate content quickly and effectively.
Even with the most complex translation jobs, you can use machine translation as a base layer, quickly translating your content into a different language. Then, on an as-needed basis, you can use professional editors to review/spot-check your translated content.
That’s how Weglot is set up, which makes it a perfect tool for businesses who want to create a multilingual website.
With Weglot you get:
If you’re interested in seeing how easy website translation can be with Weglot, start your free trial today.