Wait, what?!
You read that right: the world of machine translation.
Let’s face it: in an increasingly global marketplace, it’s logistically impossible for a company that hopes to do business across borders and language barriers, to do all of the translations in-house.
Imagine, for a moment, that your company sells jewelry, shoes or kitchen tools. There could be hundreds, even thousands, of unique product descriptions. Who’s going to translate each and every one of the product descriptions, into each and every one of the languages spoken in your target demographic?
How about the content on your help sites, your social media, and your blogs (both the posts and comments)? And how about your content in wikis, online news outlets and other websites?
The cost of human translation alone could be prohibitive, which is where machine translation comes in. Take into consideration the volume of content you need to meet your customers’ needs, and multiply it by the number of languages you need to support. Feeling overwhelmed yet? It’s OK to say yes because the task at hand is, quite frankly, overwhelming.
Finding the right company to provide the service can be as daunting as the prospect of doing all of that translation in-house, but there are key things to look for when narrowing the pool of possibilities. Among them are these:
- Is your machine translation application domain-specific to my industry? This is an especially relevant question if your field is government, software and technology, military and defense, healthcare, finance, legal, e-discovery or e-commerce because there are terminology and nuances unique to each.
- How fast and accurate are your machine translations? Remember, speed is great, but not at the expense of precision and accuracy.
- How will the cost of machine translation compare to hiring human translators? And when is it wise to use a combination of the two? If the task at hand requires a basic, rough translation only, machine translation can likely do the job adequately. But if you want to be certain that your target audience will receive the translation as you intend it, human backup is key.
- Can the machine translation tool be customized to my industry, or even more finitely, to my particular business? Populating machine translation engines with preferred business terms will go a long way toward improving the consistency of translated documents. This is important because if you’re working with a huge amount of content, it’s important to keep your company’s voice intact.
At Metafraze, we strive every day to meet your unique needs in each of these areas. We pride ourselves on providing our corporate clients with the best service, speed and accuracy in translation and localization services, customized with the quality and cost savings for your specific needs.
We welcome the chance to discuss how our services will help your company step across international borders.
