If you’re localizing the content on your website, using machine translation (MT) can speed up the process and reduce the cost. But, is machine translation right for you?
In this post, we’ll look at what various machine translation strategies involve, the technology behind machine translation engines and what form of machine translation is right for your content.
How to Choose the Machine Translation Engine ?
Machine translation has a very long history and the first translation engines were developed in the 1950s. Due to the fact that these engines have evolved over time, different MT approaches are available and old systems have been replaced by newer and more efficient models.
Now, when it comes to selecting MT engines, businesses have two main choices: generic MT engines and custom MT engines.
What is the Generic MT Engine ?
Generic MT engines like Google Translate, Microsoft Translate and Amazon Translate are not trained with data for a specific domain or topic. As a result, they’re best for general translations or translations that aren’t specific to an industry. They can often provide you with a good idea about what a section of text in another language says, but the translation is likely to contain problems with syntax and grammar.
Machine Translation vs. Human Translation
Machine translation hits that sweet spot of cost and speed, offering a truly snappy path for brands to translate their records at scale without much overhead. Yet, that doesn’t mean it’s consistently relevant. On the other hand, human translation is incredible for those undertakings that require additional consideration and subtlety. Talented translators work on your image’s substance to catch the first importance and pass on that feeling or message basically in another assortment of work.
Leaning upon how much content should be translated, the machine translation can give translated content very quickly, though human translators will take additional time. Time spent finding, verifying, and dealing with a group of translators should likewise be considered.
Numerous translation programming providers can give machine translations at practically zero cost, making it a reasonable answer for organizations who will be unable to manage the cost of expert translations.
Machine Translation is the instant modification of text from one language to another utilizing artificial intelligence whereas a human translation, includes actual brainpower, in the form of one or more translators translating the text manually.
Machine translation is mainly equipment that assists marketers or translators to accomplish a motive. However, it is not a replacement for the old systems of translation, instead, it is a modification. Many machine-based translators considerably offer their services free of charge, making them much more alluring, especially to organizations and learners.
Machine translators analyze the structure of the first content, at that point, separate this content into single words or short expressions that can be easily translated. At last, they reconstruct those single words or short expressions using the very same structure in the picked target language.
Cost-Effective Translation
Machine translation increases productivity and the ability to deliver translations faster, reducing the time to market. There is less human involvement in the process as machine translation provides basic but valuable translations, reducing both the cost and time of delivery. For example, in high-volume projects, you can integrate machine translation with your content management systems to automatically tag and organize the content before translating it to different languages.
What do you Need to Consider?
If machine translation is to add value to your business, it is important to be critical and carefully consider when it makes sense to use machine translation. Otherwise, unnecessary post-editing will have to be done and ultimately, it may harm the company and its brand as a result of poor and unprofessional communication.
In your considerations, you need to take into account what type of text it is, where it is to be used, who the recipient is and what language combination it is.
What Texts are Suited for Machine Translation?
Machine translation is best suited for texts where the language and terminology are relatively simple and which do not require the language to be creative and convincing as is the case for texts with a high branding value, such as website texts, brochures and other marketing texts.
The language combination also plays a role as the output of machine translation is certainly not good for all language combinations. Therefore, it might be a good idea to test the output for the individual language combinations to see if the result is good enough before you choose the language combinations for which you want to use machine translation.
In What Situations Can you Use Machine Translation?
Roughly speaking, machine translation makes sense when speed and price is more important than quality.
This could be when you have large volumes of content for internal use where it is only necessary to understand the outlines of the content. It might in particular be a valuable solution for large companies with foreign employees. In that case, machine translation can be of great help to the employees as suddenly, they will be able to understand the content of minutes, reports, etc. which are otherwise generally only prepared in the local language. In this example, machine translation helps ensure that communication does not stand in the way of collaboration translation process.
In addition to content only intended for internal use in the company, machine translation can also be used for content with a low branding value, such as automatic chat messages etc.
The volume of content that needs to be translated has been on a rise over the last years in line with the general globalisation. However, budgets rarely cover this need and the company might have to choose not to translate texts that they would in fact have liked to translate. With machine translation, it is now possible to translate content which would otherwise not have been translated machine translation software.
Is Combining Human and Machine an Advantage?
When you find that your text is suitable for machine translation, meaning that the output is good enough for further processing, but you do not want to compromise quality, you can choose a solution where you combine human and machine. There are different solutions for this. Your choice of solution should depend on what you expect from the quality and creativity of your text translation memory.
You can choose that a translator makes what we call post-editing of the machine translated text. With this solution, the translator spends time editing the text to make it correct and understandable. If you want an extra pair of eyes on you text, it is a good idea to have an extra proofreader read the text to eliminate any overlooked errors or misinterpretations. If your text requires the language to be fluent and creative, it is also possible to have a copywriter go through the text. In situations where a copywriter is needed, it generally makes most sense to choose a translator rather than a machine from the start.
How Do You Get Started?
Talk to your translation agency about whether machine translation can become part of your translation strategy and how to get started. Before that, you can make a list of the types of content you need to have translated and into what languages. Also consider the recipients of the texts.
When you contact Ad Hoc Translations, we will help you make a plan for how to best integrate machine translation into your strategy. We will define the types of text for which we can generally use pure machine translation if the machine output is good enough. And then we will determine when machine translation should be combined with post-editing and proofreading and what types of texts should always be translated by a human translator who can relate critically and creatively to the text.