Large language models (LLMs) have helped brands worldwide provide customers with personalized experiences at record-breaking speeds.
LLM translation has recently become more accessible, scalable, and affordable thanks to technologies like Open AI’s ChatGPT, PaLM, LLaMa, and Anthropic. These advancements have made effectively reaching target audiences that speak different languages easier than ever.
Machine translation (MT) engines such as Google Translate and DeepL are the go-to for producing base translations quickly. However, LLMs are powerful for keeping track of the tone, humor, and idiomatic expressions that are important for maintaining a consistent brand identity across languages.
There’s value in leveraging the strengths of both technologies. Integrating LLMs into the translation workflow can enhance the output of traditional machine translation engines, making them more fluent and brand-accurate.
Navigating high-volume translation with LLMs
Translation must be a component of a company’s localization and growth strategy. In this globalized market, if you’re not reaching audiences that speak languages besides English—such as Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and more—then you’re missing out on billions of speakers and potential customers.
However, translating large amounts of text is challenging in itself. There are several complexities to account for, including the need to incorporate industry terms and cultural nuances while keeping your brand voice and message consistent.
For many years, human translation was the most precise method for translating content, but it’s often tedious and requires many hours of manual work. To address the need for translating content quickly and at much larger scales, machine translation (MT) emerged as a solution.
While it’s valuable for producing accurate translations, LLMs have won out in terms of capturing brand nuance and enhancing overall quality. Their strengths include:
- Making translations sound more natural
- Ensuring cultural appropriateness
- Applying style preferences and domain-specific terminology
Striking the right balance between efficiency and quality is crucial. By integrating LLMs with MT, we’ve seen remarkable improvements in both the quality and brand accuracy of translated content. In fact, the combination has produced translations with MQM (Multidimensional Quality Metrics) score of 95+ without any human intervention.
The role of large language models in translation
LLMs raise the quality of instant machine translations, significantly reducing the human effort needed to reach maximum accuracy and language fluency. Outputs from automated translation processes that combine LLMs with MT can then be published directly or undergo quality assurance by a professional linguist.
While LLMs are making strides toward better translation results, a strong translation management system (TMS) with workflow stages can help you get the most out of them. A TMS eliminates the need to build translation technology yourself or orchestrate workflows manually. This frees you up to focus on using insights from LLMs (like edit effort estimation) to dynamically route content.
For example, Smartling’s TMS provides a centralized location for all your content and workflows and combines both human translators' expertise and AI translation capabilities. In fact, Smartling's AI-Powered Human Translation (AIHT) leverages LLMs to reduce costs and turnaround time by up to 50%.
5 use cases for an LLM translation tool
Let’s explore some immediate use cases where you could benefit from LLM translation tools:
Use case 1: Website, app, and communication materials
LLMs can add value to your product, website, and other marketing and communication material translations. Once you translate your content using MT, you can post-edit and adjust it using LLMs to make it more accurate and aligned with your brand voice.
However, it's essential to recognize that large language models can sometimes overlook nuances that human linguists can more easily identify. Because of this, human linguists’ expertise is still crucial for maintaining translation quality and accuracy. Additionally, when using enterprise tools like Smartling, linguistic teams can translate more content within the same time frame, reducing manual work without increasing manpower.
The AI-assisted human translation process streamlines your language translation efforts and ensures that you accurately convey your brand message to your target audiences across different languages and cultures.
Use case 2: Contract translation and management
Accurately translating legal agreements is crucial for businesses that operate in international markets. Legal translation errors can lead to significant consequences. For example, South Korea had to revise a free trade agreement three times due to more than 200 errors, despite spending over $27,000 on the translation.
LLMs play a vital role in streamlining the contract translation and management process. For instance, Smartling's TMS delivers instant, high-quality legal translations via Smartling Translate, a GPT-enabled translation portal. Additionally, Smartling Auto Select ensures high-quality translations by evaluating content and routing it to the best MT engine for your project while retaining your brand voice and using your brand glossary.
With Smartling, you can initiate quality checks quickly and more accurately through multi-step human and AI-enabled translation reviews. Smartling’s translation memory also improves consistency across all your documents, in addition to reducing costs.
Use case 3: Social media content
Localization involves a lot more than static web pages and documents. It can also include translating social media content. Every marketing team knows that social media moves fast, and maintaining a consistent brand voice across all languages is crucial for success.
By training large language models on your brand's specific terminology, tone, and style guidelines, you can ensure that your social media posts, comments, and messages resonate with your target audience while maintaining brand consistency across all languages.
However, it's crucial to consider the potential challenges associated with using large language models for social media translation tasks. Social media content often uses colloquialisms, slang, and cultural references, which may be hard for LLMs to translate without proper training and human supervision.
How can you most effectively use LLMs for social media translation? Consider using a TMS that combines LLMs with human review to verify translated content’s accuracy and cultural relevance and fix errors and inconsistencies. It’s also smart to monitor social media engagement and feedback from multilingual audiences to identify aspects of your current translation quality that need improvement.
Use case 4: Customer support resources
Imagine that you’ve translated your product, marketing materials, and online communications for a global audience. Users love your content. But once they start using your product, they have questions or want to learn more about it. This will require hundreds of thousands of words’ worth of translated help documentation, which can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive task.
Using MT with LLMs makes translating customer support resources—including FAQs, user guides, and help center articles—much faster. With the help of AI technology, businesses can translate considerable volumes of support content in no time so their international customers will have the information they need in their native language.
Furthermore, real-time translation using MT and LLMs can be quite useful for support tickets. When the client raises a ticket in their language, the system can translate it into the language of the support team, which allows for a quick understanding of the issue. The support team can then respond in their own language, and the system will translate the response back into the customer's language in real time.
Use case 5: Automated Post-Editing
Automating routine or learned tasks to set the stage for experts will always increase your output’s efficiency and provide higher-quality translations. LLMs can iron out translations by:
- Smoothing translated text
- Debiasing content
- Adding necessary formalities
LLMs can also assist in various pre-editing tasks, such as:
- Identifying and correcting grammatical errors and inconsistencies in the source content
- Simplifying complex sentence structures and eliminating ambiguity
- Ensuring consistent terminology usage and brand voice throughout the content
- Flagging potential cultural or linguistic issues that may impact translation quality
Additionally, Smartling AutoSelect provides up to 350% higher-quality translations in seconds. Afterward, NMT can continue to improve the translated text, and an AI-equipped team can quickly produce the final product.
Effective tactics for handling bulk translations
From legal contracts to customer support resources, businesses across multiple industries face the challenge of translating large amounts of content efficiently and accurately. However, managing bulk translations is no easy feat.
Here are a few tactics that will help you translate large volumes of text more effectively:
- Prioritize content: Evaluate your content’s necessity and relevance and focus only on what is most crucial for your business or has the most rigid deadlines.
- Use domain-specific large language models: Choose LLMs that use domain-specific training data, such as legal terminology or industry-specific language. This will ensure that translations are correct and will follow your industry’s specific needs.
- Leverage automation: Employ a TMS that integrates with LLMs to automate some of the translation workflow. These tools streamline processes like project management and quality assurance (QA).
- Implement a robust QA process: Develop a thorough QA system that involves automated checks in addition to human review. Employ QA tools that can detect common errors, including translation gaps or inconsistencies.
- Foster collaboration between linguists and subject matter experts (SMEs): Encourage collaboration between your translation team and SMEs. These experts can provide insights into industry-specific terminology, cultural nuances, and regulatory requirements.
How Smartling optimizes LLMs for translation excellence
Smartling's AI-powered TMS combines LLMs with human translation tools to efficiently deliver accurate, high-quality translations. Our platform simplifies the translation process, cuts costs, and improves time to market for multilingual content.
Experience Smartling's optimized LLM translation solutions and take your localization strategy to the next level. Schedule a demo today to see how your company can benefit from our AI-powered translation solutions.
