AI-generated translation, or Machine Translation, is nothing new to many of us (we’ve been complaining about Google Translate long before ChatGPT became popular 😉).
So what’s the big difference today? This translation technology is constantly improving. And there is a need to acknowledge that AI input can absolutely help us produce better and faster translations at scale — but only if we use it the right way.
Setting expectations for using AI-generated translations
If you or your teammates have any doubts about using machine-generated translations in your workflow, consider this very popular saying: AI is a complement, not a replacement.
AI can help us with the mundane, predictable, and repetitive parts of our translation process — think simple product information, page titles, standardized descriptions, and so on. What about the harder texts that can’t possibly be translated correctly without human insight? Well, this is where the humans come in.
By combining both machine and human insights, your team can focus on perfecting the content without getting bogged down by repetitive or simple translation tasks that even AI can get right every time.
Even at times when your team has to deal with a larger volume of content, the work feels easy and manageable.
This collaboration between human and machine means that projects can be completed more quickly. And when time is saved, so is money – a win-win in the fast-paced world of product and marketing management for a global company.
How to integrate AI translations & suggestions into your workflow
So how can you make AI translation work for you and your team without it feeling like a clunky add-on?
Using AI translations is not just generating the translation on Google Translate, and then copy-pasting it into a spreadsheet. This wouldn’t help you speed up your document translation process at all.
Instead, effective use of AI translations is done within a platform that supports all the tasks you need to do to start and finish a translation project. This would be translation management systems, like Redokun, which are usually integrated with AI translation services.
Machine Translation is only helpful and time-saving if we can access it right in the moment we need it, as opposed to having to switch to another screen to generate the content. Translating your documents on a platform like Redokun ensures that this is the case.
For example, these are the two ways to use Machine Translation in Redokun (powered by Google Translate and DeepL):
(1) Machine Translation as translation suggestions
As your team is translating a document inside Redokun’s online Web Editor, AI-generated suggestions will appear below the line of text that they’re currently translating.
They can simply click to insert and use the AI suggestion and make modifications if necessary. This helps reduce their mental load when thinking about how to translate a text segment.
(2) Machine Translation as a first draft for the entire document
Another way of using Machine Translation is to use the AI-generated suggestions as a first draft for your team to build on.
This is called the “Pre-Translate” feature on Redokun, where you as the project manager would apply the AI translations to the entire document before handing the task over to your translators.
When they open the document in Redokun’s online Web Editor to work on the document, they would find all the translations pre-filled with suggestions.
Other benefits of integrating AI into your workflow through translation tools like Redokun
(1) Empowering your team to take charge of translations internally
With this technology, you don’t necessarily need to hire professional translators for specific languages, because you can delegate the task to someone on your internal team who speaks the language.
By giving them access to Machine Translation suggestions through Redokun, you provide them with a resource that empowers them to take charge of the translation themselves. And this would also reduce your translation costs as content demand grows.
(2) Maintain consistency in the use of special terminology, no matter who does the translation
Does your company use special terms and terminology in your content? If you do, then you would want these phrases to be translated consistently across all projects.
By creating a unique Glossary for your company in Redokun, you can automatically check and notify your translators to take note of how your company prefers to translate specific text segments.
Better yet, Redokun also enhances the AI-generated suggestions in Redokun with the data from your Glossary. No matter who gets assigned to a document on Redokun, they’ll know exactly how your business translates a term or phrase through the Glossary-enhanced translation suggestions.
Summary
Introducing AI into your translation process can significantly reduce the time and energy your team needs to invest to complete their tasks.
Remember that AI should not replace human translators but complement their skills and expertise. Try uploading a document to Redokun today and see how you can start using Machine Translation with your team. Click here to create an account if you don’t have one already — translate up to 10.000 words for free.
