Machine translation services, and we refer here to “customisable machine translation”, have seen a recent surge in popularity as more and more content needs to be translated into a variety of different languages worldwide. But just what are its advantages and why is it becoming more popular?
1) Cost
Machine translation services are extremely cost effective, allowing you to translate much more of your content on a fixed budget than would be possible by using human translators alone.
2) Speed
Much faster than human translators, a machine translation service makes translating content into different languages quicker than ever before. Machine translation can be invaluable when a document needs translating and speed is of the essence. The speediness of machine translation allows you to understand a document in a different language in a matter of minutes.
3) Volume
Imagine all of the millions of words in numerous different forms all over the world. Then think of all the languages the words are in and the languages they have yet to be translated into. Machine translation makes it possible to translate much more content than ever before – in fact, much more content than could ever be conceivably translated by human translators alone.
4) It’s trainable
Customised machine translation engines can be trained with already translated content and with post edited corrections from human translators, meaning it is constantly improving over time.
5) Long term investment
The more you feed into translation engines and train them, the more accurate the translations they produce will be, meaning that over time your costs will lower as higher and higher quality translations are produced and there is less need for human editing. This could make machine translation the ideal long-term investment for your business’ future translation needs.
6) It’s not all or nothing
It’s not machine translation or human translators – using both together achieves high quality, lower cost translations.
7) Worldwide language trends
A machine translation service allows you to translate your content into a wide variety of languages, increasing the speed and lowering the cost of using human translators alone, so you can keep up with language trends.
8) Real time
Sometimes having a human translator simply isn’t cost-effective. For example, having a human translator standing by to translate every live online customer service chat would be very costly and difficult to achieve for every language used. Machine translation gives a good enough result instantly and at a much lower cost.
9) Repetitive text
Machine translation excels when it comes to repetitive text. Think of all those car manuals translated into a wide range of languages across the world. The content in them is often repetitive, something a machine translation engine can be trained to translate more rapidly and cost effectively than any human translator ever could.
10) It’s improving all the time
The technology is being heavily invested in and advancing with better results being seen than ever before.