A few weeks ago, our friends over at GALA jointly hosted a webinar with our CEO Spence Green called "Scaling Localization With Artificial Intelligence and Automation."
For many businesses in 2020, operations were already becoming more digital, more automated, and more reliant on internet based communication and collaboration. COVID-19 has only accelerated those trends. Personalized, engaging online experiences will be more important to success than ever, and core to those experiences are the linguistic availability and fidelity of information.
We believe that artificial intelligence (AI) can augment and amplify human ingenuity. By combining AI with technology-powered automation, businesses can achieve profound productivity gains across a wide range of essential functions.
At Lilt, we apply a human plus AI approach to enterprise localization. We think about localization as a production process with the goal of delivering high-quality words quickly. Like any form of production, there is a process, with different stages, different owners, and different limiting factors.
With localization, AI and automation play separate but equally important roles in helping business leaders manage the production of translated words - in order grow global revenues and build powerful global customer experiences. Together, they enable companies to reach more customers in more locales in less time.
How do you get started? Like with any new initiative, the there are two key things to decide:
For example, a sports team's objective is to maximize championships within the constraints of their budget for player and coach salaries. Or a research lab whose objective is new scientific discoveries but whose constraint is lab equipment and researcher time. For business leaders, localization objectives are often to create the highest quality translation in the largest number of languages given time and budget constraints.
We call this objective reach, or how you produce the maximum quality words under a fixed budget and timeline. The way to grow your reach is through reducing your cost per word translated and increasing translation speed, thereby enabling you to grow your translation and language quantity without having to increase budget. Sound too good to be true? That's where AI and automation come in.
AI helps drive the localization process forward by augmenting and amplifying the power of human translators. Tools like adaptive neural machine translation have an outsized affect, making translators faster, more consistent, and more accurate at their work than ever before by guiding translators to the right translation without presuming the AI system knows better.
Automation helps drive the localization process forward by augmenting and amplifying the power of human project managers. Automation can make short work of formerly manually and potentially tedious processes like transferring content into and out of a translation management system (TMS) and alerting the relevant individuals - like linguists, reviewers, and project managers - when it's their turn to work on a translation project. By reducing the time needed for each step, we see dramatic increases in translation project velocity and substantial reductions in errors.
Automation also empowers human translators, with features like auto-populating text with content from translation memories (TMs) and termbases. The technology can quickly and easily identify phrases or words it has previously seen and pre-populate those repeated phrases and words in a document with extremely high levels of certainty. That way, the technology can handle repetitive use cases so translators can spend their time on new and more challenging translation work.
Together, using AI and automation technology can and will transform how organizations expand the reach of their localization programs - maximizing translation quality and quantity for a fixed budget and time frame.
Lilt seeks to radically change the efficiency and affordability of enterprise localization by applying AI and automation, and making that technology available to our customers - through both our software and our technology-enabled translation services.
If you'd like to connect with our team and learn more, you can reach us here.