Each customer touchpoint is a potential opportunity to drive another sale. It is imperative to ensure your content remains front and center in your audience’s minds as soon as they see it. Language automation helps you reach them in the correct language and wording to make your message stand out and be memorable.

By contrast, many brands trying to break into cross-border markets put audiences through the unnecessary hoop of contending with translation friction. It’s a hoop that 40% of customers will only jump through partially. On top of that, nearly three-quarters prefer reviews in their native language.

These dynamics between language and commerce have opened huge markets to language automation, machine translation (MT), and the AI tools necessary to run it.

Bridging International Markets Online

Localization often works in tandem with language automation and translation services. While not always true, knowing a user’s national boundaries can tell web servers the most likely language(s) they use. Correlating other information about the user can also help determine which language they’ve used most recently, helping content providers more accurately employ their automated language translation services.

In other cases, it’s preferable to implement a user-friendly translation function in the app or website. Allow users to select which language they prefer from a list quickly. Many users immediately look at the upper corner of the screen to see if a web property supports other languages, even if they are multilingual. Depending on the content, a given language may be preferable for a user. Alternatively, you could serve two users speaking different languages on the same terminal.

Fully Self-Contained Language Solutions

All these considerations go well beyond translating web pages. While that’s a necessary foundation, a more complete MT solution will also encompass language-based apps, such as chat programs or AI assistants/prompts.

This is possible thanks to advanced large language models (LLM), which are suitable for a wide range of advanced language automation tasks (e.g., personalization). LLMs are trained on a gigantic data set that’s always in flux and includes multiple languages.

Neural machine translation (NMT) is another very reliable translation tool, especially for purposes requiring the utmost translation accuracy. Some even compare the results of both LLM and NMT to refine their language services further.

Customizing Your Tools for Improved Output

Just as AI tools develop over time based on their input, the quality of your machine translations may depend on how you train the language automation tools. This is necessary to stay at the forefront of translation services.

An important factor is the matter of speed. Businesses must often provide complete translation services within that crucial five-second mark when almost 75% of users click off. Sophisticated MT tools are thus as much about what they don’t do as what they do. That’s because MT must be swift and efficient—and only as much as needed to fulfill a particular function.

Advanced customization models refine your translations in greater detail. They provide more precise answers for algorithms you depend on to fulfill customer-brand engagement functions. You will only need to revisit your AI prompt occasionally. Instead, you can be confident that your translation services are automatic and as streamlined as you want.

Automation at Scale

As with eCommerce, advanced MT allows you to scale operations at the press of a button. The number of users you can provide automated language services to is unlimited, even without expending many of your company’s resources.

The more your web properties use language to engage with audiences—from web text or downloadable documents to language-based web apps and UI tools—the more you stand to gain by automating your language services. That’s true even within a single language, where localization services can help you zero in your marketing dollars.

The more people conduct their business online, the more they rely on language services. Companies that prioritize language services now will be clear front-runners in the minds of those most predisposed to new market penetration.

When it comes to international or multilingual markets, automated MT isn’t limited by scale. It’s possible to serve the needs of the most straightforward bilingual translation or support five or more separate languages while inputting practically the same amount of resources.

The ability to go anywhere from software prototyping to a “mass production” scale is the beauty of any AI tool. Applied to translation and language services, companies at any scale can secure even quite advanced MT solutions for minimal investment.

How Else Is AI Changing the Language Services Industry?

In content creation, many generative AI tools are available for drafting written or audio/video (AV) content. Businesses are already experimenting heavily with them, just as eCom pioneers in the 2000s and 2010s gradually polished their day’s CRM and sales automation platforms.

As for exactly how valuable any generative AI tool will be for business at large, time will tell. But some of the most common language services AI is making shorter work of include:

• AV translation, fit for converting whole repositories of AV recordings into an equivalent amount of searchable written web content.
• Text-to-speech readers, which are surprisingly natural. They convert any written content into speech and are for automatically building out a multimedia presence.
• Text analysis, where businesses are constantly challenged to extract meaning and actionable value from vast volumes of text.
• Personalized language generation, capable of crafting the perfect customer touchpoint based on some of the most sophisticated CRM and web marketing strategies.
• Chatbots and AI assistants are prompt-engineered to comprehend natural language queries and respond in kind (backed further by sentiment analysis algorithms).

Perhaps most interesting is that each of these tools, while wholly distinct, does share something in common. They each need to translate between languages frequently.

At its most general, MT and other automated language services are deployable virtually anywhere text exists in your digital media footprint. That means it can quickly adapt to these or any other language-based AI tools, whether existing now or under development.

All of this may sound enormously complex at a file management level, and it is. What makes it possible is that the same advanced algorithms powering AI language tools also power the file management automation services. They keep administrative functions to a minimum (if not outright eliminating them).

A Self-Reinforcing Cycle

Here’s a fitting way to conceptualize the most common growth model for AI language tools:

1. Automate a process.
2. Simplify the process and make it even more efficient.
3. Automate its administrative functions whenever possible for maximum value-adding engagements.

You want your web properties to be as self-supporting as possible. Now, your digital language services must be the same way. Improved scale, localization, and personalization are all side benefits to the core advantage of achieving full quality assurance on the fronts that matter most: the very language you use to connect directly with your audience.

Better, Faster, and Gaining Speed

One of the other significant benefits of MT and language automation tools is that they’re available instantly. In many ways, AI language services have shattered barriers to user-friendly and efficient web translations. Even better, they enhance the quality and efficiency of online business along the way.

As eCommerce continues to bridge markets worldwide, the pressure to handle translation and other automated language services increases with ever-greater effects. The sooner you hone your MT capabilities, the sooner you’ll be able to strike deeper bonds with customers in a continually expanding market. Contact us to learn precisely how.