Effective communication across languages has become more critical than ever for businesses looking to expand their reach globally. However, they face the challenge of overcoming language barriers while maintaining high-quality, culturally relevant content. This is where AI comes into play, revolutionizing the translation industry and making it easier for companies to bridge the language gap.
Read on to learn how AI translation software can address these challenges and maximize your translation ROI. We'll explore what AI translation technology is, its various applications in the localization process, and how it’s breaking down language barriers and enhancing global communication.
What is AI translation?
What comes to mind when you hear the term “AI translation”? If machine translation (MT) does, you’re on the right track.
AI-powered translation also encompasses large language models (LLMs) and various other machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) techniques.
As a result, AI has applications across the entire translation workflow, both before and after the translation stage.
The AI-powered translation process (Source: Smartling)
The evolution of AI translation software
AI, in the modern time and day, is a rapidly developing and constantly changing technology that has considerably impacted the evolution of translation software in recent years.
Important milestones of the AI journey include:
- The introduction of the Transformer architecture in 2017, which improved models’ ability to understand context and made possible the likes of Google’s BERT and earlier versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and also powered the state-of-the-art neural machine translation engines
- The widespread use of generative pre-trained language models like GPT-3 and GPT-4
- The use of attention mechanisms, a part of the Transformer architecture, which has allowed models to focus on specific components of an input sequence when generating an output sequence and has improved how models handle longer sentences
- The introduction of multilingual models, which allowed a single model to handle different languages without using a pivot language, and made for faster, more flexible and resource-friendly translation software
These advances have made AI-powered translation services faster, more accurate, and more fluent, often comparable to human translation. AI translation software can handle more complex linguistic structures, capture context and nuance, and produce natural-sounding output that reflects the original style and tone.
How can AI help with localization?
Here are a few use cases for AI in the localization process:
Pre- or post-editing text
LLMs are trained on datasets that contain billions of parameters. For the NLP tasks, they’re able to identify linguistic patterns and semantic relationships. This enables them to understand and generate human language, which comes in handy for pre- and post-editing.
For example, Smartling's AI Translation Toolkit offers advanced features for pre- and post-editing that significantly improve translation quality and efficiency. The toolkit includes:
- Edit effort estimation: This feature predicts how much editing a translation will need, helping to optimize workflow and resource allocation.
- Fuzzy match repair: This capability automatically fixes partial matches from translation memory, reducing manual editing time.
- Glossary term insertion: The toolkit ensures consistent and grammatically correct use of terminology by automatically inserting glossary terms in the correct context.
- Formality register: This capability allows users to adjust the translation formality to match the company’s tone-of-voice preference.
Content translation
Neural machine translation (NMT) transformer models are a state-of-the-art machine translation approach. While large language models (LLMs) show promise in various language tasks, Smartling has found that traditional NMT engines, especially customized NMT engines, still outperform LLMs for content translation in most cases.
NMT engines consider the entire sentences’ context to translate words correctly. They can learn over time, which allows them to translate more accurately. Overall, they're better than their predecessors—statistical MT models—at language fluency and capturing the intended meaning of source text.
An example of advanced machine translation in action is Smartling's NMT Hub, which is a combination of cloud-based MT models. The NMT Hub uses AI to select the best MT engine for the language of your content, which results in the highest-quality MTs in a private and secure environment. Importantly, while the NMT Hub primarily leverages traditional MT engines for optimal results, it also offers the flexibility to use LLMs like Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs) for translation if a customer wishes to do so.
This adaptability ensures that Smartling can cater to various customer preferences and use cases while still recommending the most effective translation approach based on current performance data.
How AI translation software enhances communication
AI translation software has revolutionized how people communicate across language barriers, offering a range of benefits that traditional human translation services can't always match.
Speed
On any given day, your to-do list could include most or all of the following:
- Sourcing vendors and vetting their translation services
- Communicating with stakeholders, linguists and translation vendors, and subject matter experts
- Prepping content for translation
- Creating translation tasks and assigning the appropriate individuals at various process stages
- Keeping tabs on the status of various translation jobs
- Overseeing quality assurance (QA) and addressing issues that come up
- Reviewing translation reports and identifying bottlenecks or optimization opportunities
All of this can take a good amount of time when done manually, and you probably have other responsibilities, too. Incorporating AI into your processes is the key to freeing your time to focus on the highest-impact activities.
Accessibility
AI translation software has made language translation more accessible than ever before. Many tools offer free or low-cost options, putting powerful translation capabilities within reach of individuals and businesses of all sizes. This has opened up new opportunities for cross-cultural exchange, global collaboration, and market expansion.
Scalability
AI-powered translation solutions empower you to translate large amounts of content instantly, helping you scale into new markets faster than manual translation could allow. The faster you can translate, the faster you can expand into new markets.
Consistency
AI translation software can also help ensure consistency in terminology and style across translated content. By leveraging machine learning models trained on customer-specific data, these tools can produce translations that accurately reflect a brand's voice, industry jargon, and preferred phrasing. This is crucial for organizations that want to maintain a consistent brand identity globally.
Should AI translation replace human translators?
As you can see, AI has extensive capabilities in powering translation workflows and ensuring efficiencies and cost-savings.
However, that doesn’t mean you should stop working with professional translators altogether.
In episode one of our Reality Series, Andrew Batwash, our associate director of language services, commented on the following:
“You can design AI [translation] systems to have effective and meaningful human intervention. What we want to do as a service provider in the language services space is really think about where the human comes into [the] human-in-the-loop system. [...] How do they add value? [...] And is it in the right place at the right time to generate the output that the customer is looking for? [...]
A lot of the conversation is [saying], ‘We're taking work away from translators, and we're going into this fully automatic world.’ [...] That's not really what it is. It's [going to be] something that’s more in the middle. Those systems, in a lot of ways, are going to help people be more productive.”
In part, progressive advancements in the functionality and reliability of AI tools used for translation work drive that human productivity advantage.
Evaluating AI translation software for your needs
When choosing the AI translation software for your business, it is essential to understand your translation needs first. Of course, you’ll want a solution that strikes a good balance between quality, cost, and speed. But you should also consider the following:
- Supported languages: AI-powered translation tools support most of the world’s languages, but at different levels of performance. It’s important to not only consider your current language pairing needs, but also how your solution will handle other language pairs you might need in the future, such as longtail languages or under-resourced languages.
- Training data: Most generic foundational MT models come trained for broader, more general domains. However, for more complex domains, we see the most benefits coming from custom model training. Either way, customer-specific data will improve translation quality.
- Integrations and application programming interfaces (APIs): For more efficient workflows, use a translation platform like Smartling that integrates with other tools you use, such as your content management system.
- Security: If you’ll be translating sensitive, confidential texts like legal documents, it’s imperative that you use an enterprise-grade security platform to protect your data.
Even with these factors in mind, it can still be hard to choose, because of the ever-increasing number of AI-powered tools out there.
The top 4 AI translation services and tools
Now that you have a better understanding of today’s AI translation space and its benefits, here are some AI-powered tools and services to look into.
1. Smartling
Smartling is one of the most advanced AI-powered translation management systems (TMSs) in the localization industry, enabling you to leverage AI across the entire localization process. It’s also one of the most highly rated by customers—G2 rated it as the #1 pick for enterprise translation management for 20 quarters in a row.
Smartling’s dashboard (Source: Smartling)
Features:
- LanguageAI-powered Translation Management System (TMS): Access an AI-driven content repository and administrative suite for all your localized content, serving as the central hub for your translation needs.
- AI-Powered Human Translation (AIHT): Leverage a hybrid approach that combines the efficiency of AI with the nuance of human translation for optimal results.
- AI Translation Toolkit: Utilize advanced AI features like edit effort estimation, fuzzy match repair, and glossary term insertion to enhance human translation quality and efficiency.
- AI Translation Hub & Dashboard: Access a comprehensive dashboard for metrics about AI-driven translations, helping you track performance and make data-driven decisions.
- Machine Translation Hub: Manage your MT needs at scale via this multi-engine, AI-powered workspace capable of instantly producing high-quality, consistent, and on-brand translations.
- Smartling Translate: Translate text and files securely in this self-service translation portal, which leverages MT and LLMs to improve translation quality and fluency.
Pros:
- AI-Powered Human Translation (AIHT) and the AI Translation Toolkit can reduce translation costs by up to 50% while maintaining human-quality translations, offering a remarkable 98+ multidimensional quality metrics (MQM) score.
- The AutoSelect tool can produce translations of up to 350% higher quality.
- We take security seriously and provide a totally private and secure translation environment.
- You can publish content 52% faster with our professional translation services.
- We offer support for dozens of common file types and 250+ languages.
Cons:
- Customers may require some training to familiarize themselves with all of Smartling's capabilities.
2. DeepL
DeepL is one of the most reliable MT engines in terms of consistent translation quality. It has several advanced features that make maintaining high quality standards easier, such as the ability to choose from lists of alternative words and view definitions of words in both the source and target language. DeepL also integrates with Smartling as one of its MT models.
DeepL’s language translator (Source)
Features:
- Unlimited text translation: Translate as much text as you need on any paid plan.
- Tones: Choose between formal and informal tones to ensure that translated text is appropriate for your audience.
- Computer-assisted translation tool integration: Get DeepL’s high-quality translations in the translation results of other tools, such as Smartling.
Pros:
- In addition to being one of the most reliable MT engines, DeepL is also cost-effective, meaning you can achieve a higher translation ROI.
- The Advanced and Ultimate plans allow you to create up to 2,000 glossaries with 5,000 entries each for greater accuracy.
- Besides the web-based version, DeepL also has desktop and mobile apps.
Cons:
- It supports fewer languages and offers fewer language pairs than some alternatives.
- DeepL currently supports just over two dozen languages but glossary support is available for less than half of those languages.
- DeepL doesn’t integrate widely with other software platforms your team may use.
3. Google’s Cloud Translation API
Google’s Cloud Translation API is the enterprise-friendly sibling of Google Translate and has two editions. The Basic edition is mainly for short-form and user-generated content like social media content or chats. The Advanced edition is better suited for translating long-form content and performing various types of customization.
Smartling's platform allows for seamless integration with Google's Cloud Translation API, enabling you to leverage this machine translation service within your Smartling workflow.
Google’s Cloud Translation API translation process (Source: Google Cloud Translation API)
Features:
- Batch translation: Translate numerous source documents at once to save time.
- AutoML technology: Train custom models to produce translations that use the right tone and terminology for your company and industry.
- Model selection: Choose between Google’s standard NMT model or a custom model, depending on the content and its context.
Pros:
- Both editions include unlimited translation, which makes them good for high-volume projects.
- You can translate content into over 100 languages, and thousands of language pairs are available.
- This API makes programmatic text translation possible for your websites and applications.
Cons:
- Glossary support is only available for the Advanced plan, giving Basic plan users less control over terminology.
- Cloud Translation API lacks integrations, making it harder to streamline your workflow.
4. ChatGPT
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, has revolutionized the AI landscape with its powerful language processing capabilities. While not primarily designed for translation, it has emerged as a versatile tool for various language-related tasks, including translation.
It offers impressive capabilities, and specialized translation tools often provide more robust and reliable solutions for business needs. For instance, Smartling Translate, a GPT-enabled, self-serve translation portal, delivers instant translations of text or documents.
ChatGPT’s translation dashboard (Source: ChatGPT)
Features:
- Conversational AI: Interact with conversational AI for diverse language translation tasks.
- Context-aware translations: Get context-aware translations in numerous language pairs.
- Multi-language support: Refine translations via multi-turn interactions.
Pros:
- ChatGPT is a cost-efficient translation solution.
- You can generate highly fluent translations in certain language pairs.
- With the right prompts, ChatGPT can adapt to various content types and styles.
Cons:
- ChatGPT may hallucinate, leading to inaccurate translations.
- There can be issues with factual accuracy and consistency across translations.
- Specialized translation tools support more language pairs than ChatGPT and deliver higher quality—especially for the more challenging pairs.
What to know about LLM classes and translation
Thanks to the popularity of ChatGPT since its launch, GPT is one of the best-known classes of large language models. Others include LLaMA (developed by Meta) and PaLM (developed by Google), and there are many more from companies like NVIDIA and Hugging Face. Regardless of the class, though, many of the pros and cons of translation with any of these LLMs are the same.
On the positive side, large language models like GPT are cost-effective, especially in comparison to fully human-driven translation. Additionally, the best LLMs are fairly fluent in some language pairs. So, they may be useful for pairs like English to Spanish, where there’s more than likely a sizable amount of quality training data for both the source and target languages.
On the other hand, some LLMs only support very limited language pairs, so they are not a good fit for translation into uncommon languages or for large and complex projects where you need to rapidly translate into multiple and perhaps new languages. Besides this, LLMs, including GPT, can sometimes hallucinate and, ultimately, introduce factual inaccuracies or irrelevant details into text.
Smartling's AI translation software: A cut above
With all of the above in mind, which of these options should you choose? With Smartling, you don't have to limit yourself. Our comprehensive suite of AI-powered solutions goes beyond just integrating top MT engines and LLMs. You'll get high-quality translations while leveraging the industry's most powerful TMS and a host of innovative, proprietary AI features.
These benefits include our AI Translation Toolkit for enhanced efficiency, AI-Powered Human Translation (AIHT) for the perfect blend of speed and human-level quality, and the AI Translation Hub for data-driven insights. All of these work together to apply your brand terminology, style, and preferences while improving efficiency, reducing costs, and performing QA at every stage of your workflow.
Smartling is the leader in a world where AI-led translation is revolutionizing how millions of businesses approach their product and marketing needs. Our solutions can help you cut translation costs by up to 50% while maintaining human-quality output and accelerating your time-to-market.
Book a meeting today to learn how Smartling can transform your translation workflow and take your business to new heights in the global marketplace.
