As a language services provider that relies on the expertise and experience of qualified human linguists and subject-area specialists, you might assume that we’d be firmly against the use of machine translation. However, that’s not the case. There’s certainly a time and place for machine translation and it can become a valuable and cost-effective ally for your business, but only if it’s used in the right way.

With that in mind, we thought it would be worthwhile providing a few tips about how machine translation can be used to enhance your business.

1. Use it sparingly

Numerous studies have found that Machine translation is not as accurate as human translation.. Machine translation struggles to translate words with multiple meanings accurately, it does not account for the tone of a translation, and it always translates literally and does not take cultural nuances into account. This leads to mistakes.

If you have a large amount of text that needs to be translated and accuracy is not important, or the translation is going to be worked on by a professional human translator at a later date, then machine translation could be the answer. Similarly, for non-consumer facing content where you just need to get the gist across, machine translation makes sense. In all other situations, you’d be wise to stay away.

2. Customise your machine translation engine

Customising the machine translation engine that you’re using will help to improve the accuracy of your translations. The customisation options available will differ depending on the platform you use. On some engines, you can upload translation memories with your desired translations for certain words, while others allow you to edit previous work so you can effectively ‘teach’ the platform to produce better translations.

3. Tailor your content

To get the best results from machine translation, it’s well worth taking some time to tailor your content to the algorithm’s strengths. You should remove any slang, colloquialisms, idioms and acronyms (unless they’re included in your terminology database) and avoid abbreviations such ‘i.e.’, ‘e.g.’ and ‘etc.’ You should also use short and simple sentences whenever possible, write in the active voice and avoid culturally specific information.

Here are a few more tips from IBM to help you tailor your content for machine translation engines.

4. Pay for post-editing from a human translator  

If the translation matters at all, please don’t release it to the world without thorough post-editing from a qualified linguist. Although machine translation has advanced greatly over the last five years, even the most sophisticated engines lack the nuanced understanding of language to be trusted entirely. If the end-product is destined for anything other than internal use, always get it checked by a human translator.

5. Use a quality language services provider 

We don’t want to blow our own trumpet, but there really is no substitute for our expert translation team. Whether you want to translate your marketing materials for an international audience or localise your product packaging for a new market, translation errors can undermine your brand and potentially carry a serious liability risk.

At Linguistica Translation and Recruitment, our team of professionally qualified translators, multilingual copywriters, editors, project managers and compliance experts are ready and waiting to produce first-class translations that your business can rely on.

For more information, please call 02392 987 765 or email info@linguistica-international.com today.