Machine Translation Boosts Translation Productivity by up to 60%

With machine translation increasing the productivity of translators by an incredible 60%, they are able to meet the demands of their clients in record time. This is especially significant in a time when more businesses are crossing borders and have the need for quick, accurate translations.

This productivity boost, combined with sophisticated neural machine translation (NMT) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, means that clients can expect better and faster service from their translation companies.

Here are the primary ways that machine translation greatly improves translation productivity.

Enabling Faster Turnaround Times

Simply put, machine translation is quick; it translates millions of words within seconds, helping linguists work at a faster rate than ever before. This, in turn, means quicker turnaround times for clients.

Consider the productivity of a human translator. No matter how fast they work, a person will usually be able to translate around 2,000 words per day on their own. When MT is added into the process, the turnaround times will be significantly lesser, both with translating and post-editing; as such, translation companies will be able to produce a greater number of projects, as well as focus on more involved localization work.

To ensure that deadlines are met, MT is an essential part of the translation process. Machine translation plays a critical role if a client has a tight deadline that requires quick delivery.

Ensuring that Outputs are More Precise

One of the amazing aspects of machine translation is that it is constantly improving its output as more content is translated, especially with the advancements made in neural machine translation. Intended to simulate a human brain’s neurons, the machine translator can collect data, make connections in the information, and assess the data as an entire unit. This means that the technology can predict the sequence of words that should appear in the translation, which helps make the output more accurate.

As machine translation accuracy increases, the post-editing process becomes quicker, allowing human translators to work at a faster pace.

Effectively Managing Large Projects

When the amount of content is particularly significant in scope, such as for large-scale legal cases, MT can translate it with speed and ease. For instance, consider a cross-border litigation case. Within only weeks, millions of words need to be produced, and documents need to be scanned for key terms and phrases. This is a task that would essentially be impossible for human translators on their own. Machine translators turn these tasks into a more cohesive process by sifting through the foreign language documents with speed, aiding the search for relevant terms, and finally, remembering those terms for later use.

Additionally, because of AI automatic translation, more repetitive tasks can be easily accounted for. These tasks consist of assigning and keeping track of responsibilities, as well as overall project management. Automating some of these administrative tasks saves both time and money, particularly when dealing with larger translation projects.

Simultaneously Translating Content into Several Languages

Oftentimes, businesses need to have their content translated into more than language, especially if they are trying to communicate information to offices across the globe. In addition, companies that are planning a global rollout of their products might require a massive translation across numerous languages.

With the assistance of MT, a language services provider (LSP) can meet the company’s language pair requirements. To make sure all future language needs are met, select an LSP that offers a wide range of languages, including less common ones.

Freeing Up Time for Complex Localizations

Because of the amount of time being saved by the machine translation service, LSPs can devote more time to intricate aspects of the client’s project, as well as spend resources on other translation activities.

For example, if a client is planning a massive multilingual website localization project, they will require numerous hours of work from their translation company. As such, the machine translator can manage the bulk of the translation, while the linguists can address more specific aspects of the localization. This includes being able to ensure that all cultural details are suitable for each region involved in the rollout.

Streamlining Translation Through Better Connectivity

Another reason for the improved productivity with MT is the increase in connectivity between machine translators and translation management systems (TMS), which streamlines the translation workflow and automates various tasks as they occur. The client can connect their plugin directly from their TMS to the translation company’s MT system, which gives them a much faster turnaround time.

In addition, the LSP can utilize the extra time to review the post-edited text more thoroughly and verify that it resembles human-level quality.

Overall, this connectivity saves time, giving the translation company more time to focus on other tasks related to the final product.

Improving Scalability

Even with the best planning and project management processes in place, sometimes the workload and the translation project scope can become greater than expected. With machine technology, the LSP can quickly scale the project to meet the new requirements. Without MT, broadening the project scope would be time consuming and could cause significant project delays.

Quickly Translating Reproduced Material

Machine translation is particularly effective for products that are repetitive in nature, such as manuals, user guides, and various reference materials. When that content needs to be reproduced into other languages, MT technology can gather and store a considerable amount of information to use for upcoming projects.

Allowing Human Translators to Focus on Post-Editing

One of the best aspects of MT is that it provides an excellent starting point for the human translators. Once the technology has completed its tasks, human linguists can focus on machine translation post-editing (MTPE). This step is essential to productivity because it takes the quick pace of machine translation and combines it with the beneficial outcomes of human translation.

During MTPE, human translators review the output and edit it for accuracy, flow, and clarity. In the process of doing this, they will also ensure that the material will resonate with the target audience. In addition, they will make certain that the content is understandable and culturally appropriate, as well as that localized information and industry terminology make sense.

The two types of MTPE are:

  • Light post-editing, which focuses on ensuring there are no critical errors in the machine translation’s final output, including checking that the translation is grammatically correct.
  • Heavy post-editing, which allows the translator to carefully read and revise the machine translation output to ascertain that the final translation is precise.

Although it might seem like adding in MTPE makes the translation process more time consuming, it actually saves time because it allows mistakes to be found before the work gets closer to being finalized.

Increasing Productivity in Specific Areas

There are several specific areas in which machine translation helps to enhance productivity, including:

  • Videos: One of the key aspects of video production is the creation of subtitling. During this process, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation are combined to ensure that accurate subtitles are generated. First, the audio must be transcribed. With ASR, the transcription can be automatically processed. The next step is machine translation, which involves entering the original text into the computer, then generating the subtitles in the target languages. MT makes subtitling and other parts of video content translation more efficient.
  • Internal communication: For companies that operate in numerous international regions, effectively communicating with employees can be challenging. Ideally, messaging should be sent in each location’s native language to ensure that all employees fully understand the communication’s intent. However, this can be a nearly impossible task, depending on how many international offices the company operates from. With machine translation, the language barriers can be eliminated, and employees will be able to fully understand the communication they receive.
  • Announcements: When businesses need to announce a product update to their global markets, they often require a quick means for disseminating the information. For instance, a software company might have an update that it wants to alert all customers about at the same time. If the software is available in several markets, it would be difficult to communicate the information without the assistance of machine translation.
  • Website content that will frequently be updated. When businesses have multilingual websites, keeping the content current across all sites can be difficult. This includes updating product availability, blog posts, and product reviews. By integrating machine translation into the updates, new information can be translated and published automatically.

With the tremendous boost that MT gives to the translation industry’s productivity level, language services providers can offer more options to their clients. Whereas where once they had to spend significantly more time on the actual translation, they can now put their resources into other aspects of the translation or localization project. To reap the benefits that MT provides, partner with an AI translation service that will collaborate with you to meet your project’s requirements.

Summary

With machine translation bolstering productivity by up to 60%, translation companies can work faster and more efficiently for their clients. As linguists spend less time on the translation, they can focus more on post-editing and other aspects of the translation project, which is beneficial to customers.