Machine Translation

The net allowed businesses to flex their global wings. No longer did you have to open up a foreign subsidiary or pin down complex global partnerships. If you put up a website, you're instantly accessible from all over the world. This global capability has spawned an entire world of new possibilities. And of course, brought in new problems at the same time. One of the most persistent is also the most fundamental: language. It's hard enough to get everyone in your company moving in the same direction when you're all speaking the same language. But when you have two (or even more!) languages to worry about, the problem may be almost crippling. Businesses could, and often do, hire human translators. But that can be an expensive option for smaller companies. A better option for the small businessperson is machine translation. Though it's not as effective as human translation, it's instant, incredibly cheap and good enough to make multi-language communications possible if not perfect. Michael Quinlan, the founder of machine translation company Transparent Language, explains why, in some situations, machine translation is even better than the human kind.

Machine Translation Enables Instantaneous Communications

Most people think of translation as publishing. "I take this white paper and I will publish it into Japanese and into German for the people in my Tokyo and Berlin offices," says Quinlan. "But what's really happening, and what people are starting to get now, is that everybody needs to and will be able to see everything in the network in their own language in realtime." "What's new, and what only computers can do, is to allow you find a document about a product launch that's in your company archives, but it's in the Berlin office in German. You can instantly see when and where the product is being launched, who the project manager is, what the budget is, and all that other stuff, because as you view it, the network is making a high quality, instantaneous translation from German to English. Humans can't translate a 10-page document in two seconds," he says. And humans also can't keep on top of translations. Change one or two sentences in a pre-translated document, and you need to translate it all over again. A machine, which does work on the fly, can do it in realtime.

Machine Translation Enables Global Chats

If you've ever sat in a meeting with a human translator, you know the translation process is deadly slow. Trying to translate the back-and- forth of a phone conversation is even worse, slowing communications down to a crawl. But with machine translation, colleagues in different countries can do typed chats. They just have to integrate with the messaging program. "With our Enterprise Translation Service fully integrated to Lotus Notes or Lotus Sametime or Microsoft Outlook or Exchange or whatever the underlying infrastructure is, they can have this conversation and go back and forth between the two people who really count," he says. In fact, this kind of inter-company communication is what Transparent Language focuses on. He says their clients have many of the same issues no matter what industry they fall into. "It always has something to do with cross-language communication such as e-mail or cross-language chat: collaboration so people can work on the same project together across languages. That's especially true in the engineering and marketing groups - cross-language information retrieval so that somebody in Japan can see an English language human resources document or whatever and have cross-language support," he says. We've said it before, and not too long ago - machine translation isn't perfect. But it is cheap, fast and once implemented, easy enough for a child to use. We wouldn't recommend using machine translation for vital communications like international marketing efforts that reach out to customers. But for inter-company and on-the- fly communications, there's no option as easy to implement as it is on the bottomline.