AI Integration and The Future of Translation

Artificial Intelligence can be a source of contempt and fear in the translation industry. But is this the boogie man, or are we seeing a repeat of the Machine Translation craze from back in the day?

Let’s explore how AI Integration can be the future of translation.

A tool for productivity

In this industry, while faster doesn’t mean better, it can certainly help. With machine translation, our industry took a turn to higher speeds. With artificial intelligence, that speed increases with the help of a tool that helps to adapt the text to every little language detail you need to localize.

AI can show you different options for a word, based on regional preferences, it can set the tone from formal to informal, and it can be the difference between spending work days to hours translating a text.

Your built-in editor

Generative AI-powered tools, like BWX’s Translation Smells, can tell you when something doesn’t look quite right based on grammar, syntax, glossary and context. That is like having an extra pair of eyes translating with you, and it’s certainly helpful with highly specialized texts like medical and marketing translations.

Affordable option

AI doesn’t only help to reduce costs for agencies, it reduces costs for translators as well. Instead of paying 500 a year for a newer version of the translation tool an agency requires to send you potential work, what if you could use a tool that costs under than 100 a year and can read the same formats?

This is a reality now.

You can save on software and hardware and work where you have ta barely-there internet connection… No more worrying about your hotel’s internet connection when you are traveling to paradisatic locations. No more suffering because your computer can’t hold the RAM consuming software.

Accessible tool

I am a translator. I live in a country where the internet is somewhat stable most of the time. So… I can’t always rely on CAT tools that require over 10 Mbps. When I started in translation, my computer couldn’t even run a common CAT tool that usually requires over 8GB of RAM.

Cloud-based, light translation software, like BWX native software, solved this for me. And now that it is available for translators outside the platform, you can also use it.

Powering creativity

Translation is not only a time-consuming job, it can be pretty tasking in the creativity department. Often, you have to produce several versions of the same sentence to see which one fits better.

AI can help you with that.

MT can check your grammar.

If you combine both, you get an all-rounded solution that can work for you instead of against you. This gives you room to be more creative and come up with more possible translations compared to what you’d come up using only your imagination.

‍

I am not a seer… But here is what I think

Same as when electricity replaced kerosene but didn’t kill the candles AI is not out there to get us., Digital cameras replaced camera film, but that didn’t take photographers out of work.

This is only a new tool for us. A tool we can fear or we can learn to use to our advantage.

And hey! Can you imagine a tool that combines the benefits of machine translation and generative AI? Well… You don’t have to! It already exists, and you can find it right here.

‍