Automated translation: A game-changer for multilingual content

Thanks to modern technologies, the best thing we can experience is significantly simplifying the major part of domestic and work processes. If progress started and developed organically and smoothly in some industries like manufacturing, agriculture, etc., the IT industry and related fields made a huge jump in the last decade.

This article focuses on translation and how its automation has changed multilingual content creation. Thus, we will start our journey in 2016, when neural machine translation was released for society, and AI patterns began to be used for local content adaptation.

If you want to learn more about the translation industry's history, we highly recommend reading our previous article, which overviews the latest modern period and the early 20th, when machine translation was created.

Read more → Translation Industry: history, impact, and trends.

Automated translation tools. Types and use cases

The translation tool market provides various solutions that are constantly improving; let's overview the most widely used automated translation services. Machine Translation (MT) The phrase "automated translation" is often first associated with machine translation. Nowadays, Google, DeepL, Amazon, etc., provide powerful yet simple and available tools that allow even work with different content, more simple travel, and getting information from various resources for education and entertainment.

The accuracy for some language pairs has already reached 90% (English-Spanish with Google Translate), which minimizes human efforts. With the new trend of the last decade — neural networks that are constantly studying — we can predict that the other language pairs will also reach such a high level of automation in the near future.

MTPE (Machine translation post-editing)

Based on the previous paragraph, the automated language translations industry faces an entirely new concept of MTPE, in which humans work only as editors for pre-translated content, saving time at the starting point. This process is more convenient for customers and translators as it saves time and requires less effort. The only challenge that can appear is an honest and effective effort calculation. However, the good news is that Lingohub has already found a solution to handle this.

Read more → How to count the efforts during MTPE

Translation memory (TM)

The other instrument which can be unfairly underrated is translation memory. Its main advantage is that translation memory can collect the content during translation to provide suggestions in the future. Based on their types, translation memories can be split into two types:

• File-based TM, which requires export of the translations into it and can provide suggestions limited by the data in these files.
• Virtual (smart) translation memory that studies during your work with content. This TM type is much more convenient as it allows users to avoid the constant uploading of new translations.

Take a look at the example below: Lingohub provides the TM suggestions and the percentage of consistency with the text segment. You can get up to three suggestions and check the differences in your translations from the start.

Terminology management tools

Termbases or glossaries are fundamental instruments for consistency in the project. The correct usage of a term throughout all the content in the project (software, website, help center, social media, etc.) is impossible without it, as even one person can't remember which exact variation of a word was used a month ago. What can we say about teamwork when different people work on the same documents?

As with all translation-related tools, the automation of the glossary is highly important. Without it, the translator can miss some terms that should be checked inside the documentation and have to spend additional time searching for corresponding translations. At Lingohub, for example, each term is highlighted, and the quality checks tool can inform users about deviations from the term's translation.

How does automated translation software change the industry?

Often the translation automation tools are combined in the CAT (computer-assisted translation software) or TMS (translation management solutions) because they do not provide enough benefits for the translation process alone.

As a result, the demand for combined automatic translation software constantly rises. For example, the TMS market was valued at $2 billion in 2023 and is estimated to grow over 18% yearly from 2024 to 2032.

Such a market rise is conditioned by the positive changes in the processes because of the implementation of TMS. With their support companies:

• Quickly speed up the localization/translation;
• Scale the language number without significant effort;
• Manage the content regardless of its volume without challenges;
• Build a continuous localization process;
• And many more.

We know that the actual cases say more than a hundred words, that's why we suggest to check:

• How TELUS Agriculture and Consumer Goods accelerated the localization process three times and automated localization.
• How CompanyMood reduced the localization cost by 15%.
• And how Rocket.Chat supports over 65 languages and manages the translation volunteers' contributions seamlessly.

Current challenges and potential issues of automated translation tools

Despite their high effectiveness, automatic translation software still requires deep human control as it can't fully handle content adaptation.

The translation process is much more complex than finding the correct translation for the word correctly. Sometimes, it requires a creative approach (UX copywriting or content transcreation), which includes the following abilities and knowledge:

• Understanding of cultural nuances and audiences;
• Deep learning of the context;
• Handling rare languages;
• Knowledge of the ambiguous terms;
• Legal and privacy compliance;
• Etc.

Today, even the best-trained neural engines combined with additional automatic translation tools can't guarantee a quality result. The main reason is that no perfect model has been developed yet, and each existing language model was trained on tremendous human text examples that also can contain (definitely contain) some mistakes.

Which automatic translation solution can provide Lingohub?

As a translation management system, Lingohub lets you automate nearly every aspect of your localization process. From text uploading into the system to the final delivery, Lingohub simplifies the localization journey.

Automated content import

Whenever you have your localization files in GitHub, GitLab, Azure, Bitbucket, Figma, Contentful, Storyblok, etc., you don't have to worry about manual files going back and forth. Connect your apps and repositories and forget about the files updating.

With Lingohub, all changes in the text segments will be synchronized with the content source app. Moreover, you can set up a workflow that combines the steps for text processing, such as initial text status setup, automated quality checks running, etc.

Automated content translation

The most significant part of manual translation tasks is fully covered and takes just a few seconds. The following features were designed for maximum translation automation:

• Translation memory (TM) - that collects the approved translations and allows reuse of them.
• Machine translation (MT) with the three robust engines under the hood (Google Translate, Amazon Translate, and DeepL).
• Glossary that provides the correct translation for specified terms.
• The pre-translate feature that can automatically fill all the segments you need.
• Automated quality checks that warn about any deviation from predetermined rules.

Automated translated content delivery

As we mentioned, smooth synchronization with the apps and repositories allows Lingohub users to push the changes to their systems smoothly.

For example, for the repositories, Lingohub provides Git branching support, which means you can keep your main code clean and quickly translate the separate parts of the software. Push changes, create pull requests, integrate localization in your development processes, and use REST API for customization - you are fully flexible with our platform.

To sum up

The translation automation industry has reached historic heights and now offers tools that would have sounded fantastic even 10 years ago. But still, human efforts are required in language translation, as machines can't understand all the linguistic and cultural nuances. That's why automation can perfectly work as the initial step and replace tedious, repetitive manual tasks like file uploading and general pre-translation.

At Lingohub, we provide tools that simplify the routine and allow humans to focus only on the quality of translation. Try how it works with the 14-day trial right now, or book a demo call with our team, where we will guide you through all the abilities.