Humans and Machines — Partners not Enemies
By: Naomi Burgess
Tags: Localization, Ecommerce, Machine Translation, Content Strategy, Translation

With machine translation showing no signs of slowing down, can you afford to not have some robots in your task force?

Machine translation has been buzzing around as a great cost-saving solution in the world of translation for some time but what does it really mean and what are the risks to your business?

Looking at the infamous Speed, Quality, Cost triangle it would suggest if you are saving cost and significant time then quality must be what you sacrifice.

Is there a way you can take advantage of the benefits of machine translation and still maintain the quality of content that reflects your product or brand?

We thought why not?

Initially we ran some tests using the standard machine translation tools available to us all, Google Translate, Deepl, etc, and found that as an out of the bag solution these tools had come on leaps and bounds. They were certainly good enough to be used for very repetitive content production, simple product catalogues for example.

However, they were not so good at more complex content like luxury product descriptions and we certainly didn’t want to appear ‘Dumb’ in the wrong area.

We wondered how long we’d have to wait for them to be ready to handle high quality translation. We wanted to be part of this future but didn’t want to sit twiddling our thumbs until others were ready.

We thought what if we could build our own tool?

So that’s what we did.

Wezen is a cloud-based SaaS platform that supports content creation and translation. We are focused on making it the best it can be, so we rolled up our sleeves and built our own machine translation.

We started running some tests internally to see how good we could make it. We tested our machine against the leading competitor and a human translator.

We showed our internal team a selection of sentences that had been translated by all three. We asked them to say which they thought were the best translations without telling them which translation method had been used. The results were really positive.

Out of 20 segments Wezen was chosen as the preferred translation 14 times

Then we approached one of our favourite clients said we think this might work for you. They were immediately on board and we would be able to finally see if our hard work had paid off.

We scraped 4 years worth of content we had previously translated to train a brand-specific machine translation tool just for them.

We then ran a series of tests with our team of reviewers to check the quality and point out any major discrepancies. Then we tested and learned from the results until we were happy we had a good standard.

After the 4th test our Machine Translation was performing as well as a senior translator in most cases.

Celebration ensued! We had done it! 🎉

We started using the machine translation with some old products before launch and realised that although the machine was good it wasn’t as perceptive, in some areas, as our great human team. For example it wasn’t the best at figuring out the correct gender to assign to different words and sometimes it would translate brand names with some hilarious results.

We needed our Human team to keep the Machine working at the level of quality our client expects from us every day.

With a combination of machine to do the initial translation and a fantastic human team to check up on those areas where it gets confused we managed to get all three sides of the triangle! Cost reduction, more efficient time scales, quality maintained.

In the past, we have had up to 40 translators working at once to translate content in a quick turn around. Now we only needed to find 4 excellent reviewers to ensure the same quality is being achieved.

Machine translation is catching up fast in terms of quality and accuracy. Here at Wezen we are leading the way into this future with your brand in mind. In a world saturated with up-to-date content — Don’t get left behind!

If you want to talk to us about how we could build your brand it’s own machine translation tool then email us at welcome@wezen.com