Would AI translation work for you?
Depends..
Like most things, AI translation works in the right circumstances – but is much less effective in the wrong ones and can be a liability to the unwary. Before opting to AI translate content, it’s worth understanding some key points.
Offering AI translation as part of our services, we can help you through the issues to ensure that the product you receive is good to go. As you’ll see reading on, the technology isn’t universally applicable so we only offer this in language combinations that we are confident will be effective for you.
Going beyond its predecessor machine translation (MT), AI translation uses what it “knows” to try and understand language factors such as context, audience etc.
But like humans, it only knows what it knows or can deduce. With some languages, where extensive translated content is available to train the AI, output can be pretty good but does depend on the specifics. For creative or specialist, or carefully crafted text such as for sales brochures, AI translation is largely limited by how much it’s learned.
For customer-facing content in particular – and in our experience most other material – post-translation review and revision by an experienced and professional human translator is essential if your translations aren’t to risk having serious errors.
So would AI translation be a good option?
Translation by AI works best with content that has a lot of repetitive or similar content, or that uses well-established language with lots of precedent translation. In fields such as accounting, automobile or white goods manuals, or chemicals or petroleum for example are ones where it can bring powerful benefits (and cost savings).
Where AI translation is less capable however is in creative or unusual text, or rarer languages. We employ AI translation in-house and for some content, it’s certainly a great tool. For other material, while it does offer benefit it needs detailed mother-tongue review and revision. That’s true even in common languages like French – but the less common the language is, the less capable AI translation becomes as it has a far smaller canon of language available.
So can (or should) you use AI translation in-house?
That really depends on what language resources you have available there. If you’ve multilingual staff able to review and revise AI-translated output in-house – and if they can spare the time from their main job – then there’s nothing to stop you doing so.
A couple of words of caution however: Firstly, good wordsmithing is a rare skill. If you AI translate your brochure, and give it to the great majority of your employees to review/revise, you’ll end up with stilted repetitive content that will not showcase your product well.
Secondly, if your business has unusual tech or content or a particular style, AI will struggle. Having learned only from published content and limited training, AI is largely constrained to that in translating your content. Your uniqueness and signature style may be lost and – if your offering is complex or unusual too – the text will likely be misunderstood (and so mis-translated).
What about the language? Does it work in anything?
AI is based on Large Language Models, or LLM – essentially, it’s “fed” lots of content and taught how that works. Bear in mind that many languages have totally different structure and grammar, so AI’s effectiveness in a language depends on how much content, and of what quality, it’s consumed, and how well it’s been trained in the rules of that language.
Not every language has a large canon of high-quality material available, so while AI may offer translation in a wide range of languages the AI’s style and accuracy in a particular language may be based on a very limited dataset.
Caution is recommended.
We have online AI translation for our website – that’s OK right?
Kind of…
Online translation means the translation will never be reviewed – so if your site’s online translation displays glaring errors, you may never know (and would be unable to correct them anyway).
A second and important factor is that Google doesn’t index online-translated content. Online translation is ephemeral – it exists only while you have that page loaded. That means your online-translated website will never rank, because as far as Google is concerned it doesn’t really exist.
If you simply want users to understand your content reasonably well, AI may well offer an adequate solution.
If however you want your translated content to impress, attract, and rank, it’s not a good solution.
Interesting. Anything else?
Confidentiality is a big issue. Anything you put into – for example – Google Translate goes into their own LLM meaning confidentiality is not preserved. Others are better but still merit caution – read their Terms of use carefully.
The only really safe solution however is to work in a secure space – some AI tools offer this. We work in our own dedicated AI space which ensures your content is secure; note however that this is not available for some rarer languages, if our translators for those cannot work that way.
Our translators are prohibited from using either MT or AI without our explicit permission, so total control of content is assured.
Finally, one aspect often not addressed is bias. Most LLM data comes from historical sources which tend to have a “white, male, Western” background. This leaves a “footprint” in the LLM which will tend to steer AI translation in that direction, potentially embodying this bias into your translated content and flying in the face of equality and diversity. That can be a real issue which again, emphasises the need for professional human review and revision.
The bottom line
AI translation is powerful, and will become more so as it develops. However, AI is a tool, not a solution – it’s a brave user indeed who’s willing to bet their company’s reputation solely on AI!
There’s one other reason to use our AI translation solution.
Our secure AI translation system also embodies past work we’ve done for you, not only capturing your existing content to retain your terminology and style, but frequently also saving you cost.
By integrating AI into our human translation processes, with detailed revision and review by experienced, professional and well-qualified translators, we enable our clients to leverage both the benefits of AI’s power, and the skillset of our 30 years’ of translation expertise.