When it comes to translation, enterprise organizations have the needs of groups of people in mind, whether it is customers, employees, partners, vendors or constituents. In this case, providing multilingual content will help the organization comply with legal requirements, improve internal communication, increase customer satisfaction or generate additional revenue. The deployment opportunities for automated translation are endless in this category, but there are several trends that have emerged as a starting point for automation.
Companies with a global customer base or office locations in several countries have a very real need for translation and that need continues to grow. For example, customer support for a global market requires documentation, websites and support personnel to be multilingual. Now imagine translating 1000 page manuals, thousands of pages of knowledgebase content, customer emails (and responses) and providing phone support in many languages. Completing this in a timely manner without significant automation is simply not feasible if a company wants to be a player in the market today, not 5 years from now. This example illustrates the need for automation in the translation process.
There are many ways statistical machine translation can be deployed in the enterprise. The greatest impact is on high volume translation projects, or in areas where the information would never be translated without automation. However, with each deployment, it is important that the software is customized for the particular company or subject area to see significant productivity gains.
In many cases, companies will manage the translation process in house so they will follow the same process as language service providers for deploying SMT in the workflow.
Other deployments include translation of:
The quality requirement for each of these varies. For example, legal documents and marketing material require very high quality translations. Knowledge base data, on the other hand, does not require the high level review legal documents do. Regardless, automation and SMT can significantly improve translation productivity.
The following is an overview of how SMT can be used within the translation workflow for many types of documents within the enterprise. When deciding how to incorporate automated translation, the most important question to ask is: What level of quality do the end-users require?
SMT workflow deployment options
For enterprise customers, some level of customization is recommended to ensure high quality translations. There are different quality requirements depending on the type of document being translated, but almost all deployments require customization by Language Weaver. For more information, please visit our Customization page.