Most of us have used widely available automated machine translation tools such as Babel Fish, Google Translate, or SYSTRAN to try to understand a website, an email or just a phrase we have heard. They are quick, free and very easy to use but rarely accurate enough to be sure of the exact meaning. So can such tools have any application to marketing?
Relying on any automated system always has its major risks, particularly if the outcome is unpredictable. The same is true of machine translation (MT). Most MT tools are rule-based and hence produce largely literal results. However, it is fair to say that MT technology has come a long way over the last 40 years and the emergence of statistical tools does herald a whole new range of opportunities.
Marketing content characteristically tends to be short, punchy and idiomatic, often breaking all the rules of grammar, punctuation and spelling, while MT tools rely either on lots of repetitive text or literal rule-obeying sentences. An inherent contradiction then?
In practice, if no handy alternative exists, potential customers will resort to the widely available free online MT tools. Certain types of marketing content can be quite banal and repetitive e.g. datasheets, loyalty program rules etc. so may better lend themselves to Machine Translation. Applied with care, under the aegis of linguistic QA, MT can play a role in marketing projects with a high volume of low-level content. For anything else, caveat emptor!
If you really are desperate to generate some international traffic with no budget then click on the button below to see an automatic translation of this page into French (well, a version of French anyway).
Google Translate