LLMs (large language models) have helped brands worldwide provide personalized experiences to customers regardless of language or background (at record-breaking speeds).
And LLM translation has recently become more accessible, scalable, and affordable thanks to technologies like Open AI’s ChatGPT-4 (and its GPT predecessors). It’s made reaching target audiences who speak different languages easier than ever.
While there are other options for tools you can adopt with artificial intelligence technologies, such as Google Translate or similar translation models, they often fall flat in achieving cost, quality, and speed objectives for brands looking to scale their localization programs.
Some platforms provide translation solutions from a technical or theoretical standpoint, but they tend to sacrifice quality, accuracy, and relevance to the cultures you hope to reach. Additionally, these translation models often sacrifice your brand voice in the process.
But don’t get us wrong—LLMs do have a place in the translation process. They’re effective for nuanced tasks like inserting glossary terms and gender debiasing, and even provide accessibility solutions like narrating text for the visually impaired. They are also getting better and smarter every day.
That’s why choosing the right tool to leverage LLM and combining it with neural machine translation (NMT) technologies can help you create the best translation possible that accurately communicates your message through the complexities and nuances of each culture and situation.
LLM translation tool: A business essential
Translation must be a component of a company’s localization strategy.
The market is globalized, and if you’re not reaching audiences who speak languages besides English (or your source language)—like Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and more—then you’re missing out on billions of speakers and potential customers.
Translations are the first step to expand your market reach, scale your company, and multiply growth.
The issue is that the old way of accurately translating your platform or content required many hours and tedious work. As the technology evolves, large language models are becoming better equipped to handle larger and larger data sets and produce multilingual copy, approaching human parity very closely.
Why businesses need specialized translation for large volumes of text
What’s the difference between a run-of-the-mill translation tool and an enterprise solution?
A great platform will utilize proprietary technology to train & improve language models.
While LLMs are making strides toward better translation results, a strong translation management solution will allow for workflows that require both humans and AI, with machine learning providing value to translations by contributing to grammatical precision & enhancing the fluency of the language.
Specialized translation (assigning translators with domain expertise to specific workflows) is required, especially considering different markets, context within culture and languages, and your unique brand voice. But language is subjective, so individual preferences can influence whether someone views a translation as “good” or “bad.” These subjective tendencies can make it challenging to measure translation quality consistently.
And large volumes of text present a challenge for traditional solutions. It is costly and tedious to translate at scale. Think of the complexities involved when incorporating industry terminology and cultural nuances—all while maintaining the consistency of your brand voice and message.
Software like Smartling’s TMS allows all your content and workflows to work in one place, combining human and AI translations. This process is how brands produce translations with a 42% faster time to market and 30% cost reduction.
Smartling’s technology also makes this possible by processing billions of words into accurate, high-quality, brand-approved content that resonates with multilingual target audiences.
Within the platform, Smartling’s machine translation software utilizes machine learning to train based on your industry and domain, which in turn can produce human-quality translations that require less processing time and cost much less than a traditional human translation.
Here, we’ll explore immediate use cases where you could benefit from an enterprise machine translation solution.
Use case 1: Translating your website, app, and communication materials
LLMs can add value when translating your product, website, and other marketing and communication materials. Despite some limitations, LLMs can overlook nuances which are consciously discerned by human linguists. This essential step prepares you for the marketplace in a different country or an audience of different languages.
The expertise of human linguists remains crucial for maintaining the quality and accuracy of translations; however, aided with enterprise tools such as Smartling, linguistic teams can translate more content within the same time frame, reducing manual work without increasing manpower.
Use case 2: Contract translation and management
How important is an accurate translation of legal agreements? Very. For example, South Korea had to revise its legal translation of a free trade agreement three times because of more than 200 translation errors (even though they’d spent $27,000 on translation review to verify its accuracy). Accurate translations can prevent miscommunication and save time, headaches, and legal complications.
Smartling delivers instant, high-quality translations of legal texts (via its GPT-enabled translation portal). It ensures quality by evaluating the content and using AI to route the source to the best MT (machine translation) 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 multiple-step translation reviews conducted by linguists and AI. Translation memory technology within the platform also improves consistency across all your legal documents and text generated by your brand, in addition to reducing cost.
Use case 3: Publish translated social media content
Localization includes a lot more than static web pages and documents. It can also include social media content. And every marketing team knows… social media moves fast. If brands want to match the same strategy and frequency they have with their original social media posts, it’s impossible to do it at scale alone.
LLMs make translations quick and possible across all your social media channels. It’s also a great way to connect with other users through translated messages, comments, and links to downloadable resources.
You can nurture customer relationships and your audience in multilingual markets with quick, high-quality translations.
Use case 4: Translating customer support resources
Imagine you’ve translated your product, marketing, and online communication. Users love it. Then, once they start using your product, they have questions or they want to dive deeper into it.
Uh-oh.
That will require hundreds of thousands of words’ worth of help documentation.
These supporting assets help streamline your customer service and keep users happy. But if such assets don’t exist for your global users speaking different languages, they’ll have a rough experience.
AI translation helps efficiently process and translate support resources so they’re readily available for each target language you serve.
Use case 5: Pre-editing content for optimized outputs
Like any good process, automating routine or learned tasks to set the stage for experts will always help increase your output and provide better quality.
LLMs can iron out raw translations through smoothing, debiasing, and adding certain formalities. Through editing predictable, learned content and working within clear parameters, LLMs can process translations to speed up editing. Tools like Smartling Translate offer innovative ways to leverage its GPT-enabled portal for up to 350% higher quality translations in seconds.
Afterward, NMTs can continue to improve the translated text, and an AI-equipped team can quickly produce the final result.
Translation management in action: Pinterest’s success story
Pinterest wanted to expand and better serve its global audiences. The company used a localization tool for translation but ultimately sought another solution for state-of-the-art results.
Pinterest needed translation management software that could execute consistent results across every version of its site. The tool had to work fast, streamline translation, reduce errors, and offer the best customer translation experience possible.
The company chose Smartling’s Translation Management System, a flexible solution that helped ship quicker, high-quality translated content to its audiences.
The team reported, “We are now able to implement fast linguistic quality assurance, and translators enjoy the advantages of seeing content as it will appear on our website. Working with Smartling’s Translation Management System has also eliminated a number of daily localization tasks, once required of our engineers, freeing up their time to work on other projects.”
The company saw many benefits, including reducing translation time from 48 hours to less than eight. Because of the simplicity of shipping in different languages, the platform has maintained its product and quality in more than 30 languages.
This solidifies Pinterest as an international, multilingual brand and positions the platform to grow its user base worldwide.
Choosing Smartling: Real-world impact and business benefits
Accurate, high-quality, specialized translations are the most effective ways to multiply your brand’s growth. You can increase revenue and connect with new customers by entering new markets, using better translations to strengthen current audiences, and streamlining your processes simultaneously.
Schedule a demo and see how your company can benefit from AI-powered translation solutions today.
