Readers of Douglas Adams know that “if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.” Most of us would find this fictional fish very useful, whether we’re traveling in foreign countries, trying to decode the lyrics of a heavy-metal band, talking to a teenager, reading an e-mail from a prospective spouse in a faraway country, or browsing a Chinese Website.
The concept of a universal translator comes closest to reality in the form of machine translation (MT). You may have experienced MT at sites such as SDL’s Freetranslations or Yahoo’s BabelFish, useful places for getting the gist of foreign-language content. Or you may have received a sales call from a company introducing you to MT as part of a Website globalization strategy. If you’re like most other marketing executives, you’ll like the idea but dismiss it because MT just can’t achieve the rhetorical quality that marketing sites or collateral need.
But consumers are far less finicky. Our research has found that they regularly use MT when higher-quality human-translated materials are not available. Last year we surveyed 2,430 consumers in eight countries where English is not the native language. We asked respondents who had made online purchases, “How often do you use automated machine translation such as BabelFish, Google, or SYSTRAN to better understand the English you read at a Website?”
As a whole, more than half use MT – 35% use it sometimes, another 15.5% turn to online MT frequently, and 3% rely on it always.
Knowing that foreign consumers will turn to machine translation in the absence of any material in their language, how should you use MT to facilitate your own outbound communications? Here are two approaches:
- Don’t use MT. Have humans translate your marketing message. No machine will ever achieve the rhetorically compelling text that you’re looking for. If you have a limited translation budget, at least provide translated messages and differentiators – the most critical brand elements you want your audience to remember.
- Offer an MT choice. Even if you have an aggressivebudget for translation, you’ll never be able to translate everything, so think about providing an MT button that has been tuned to your industry and jargon. Remember to alert visitors to potential issues, and monitor the requests so that you know what content receives sufficient interest to justify the upgrade to human translation. This strategy gives foreign-language visitors a choice between the de facto zero translation and the imperfect machine translation they will use anyway. It’s better because your optimized MT, while still not human quality, will be significantly more accurate and more readable than the untuned results of any generalized, free MT Website.
When you let consumers opt in for MT, here are two pointers for best practices:
- Trust MT in some languages more than others. Our research shows that consumer MT usage maps intriguingly to the relative quality of available technology (with Spain being an exception). For French and German, the low quality is less low than for Turkish, Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese. The exception here is Japanese, where we have observed notoriously poor results. That said, as early adopters of online browsing, Japanese consumers have gained a tolerance for computer-translated output.
- Never represent MT output as your own content. Do not publish output from MT without post-editing and review. If you position MT output as your own, visitors will naturally assume you have read and approved the possibly bizarre content they are reading. If you choose (unwisely) to provide MT without editing the output, make sure that your visitors know what to expect. Even so, you should expect them to blame you for the outrageous results that sometimes occur.
The bottom line: If you do not provide human-translated content for your Website visitors who don’t speak your language, they’ll probably find some free MT on their own. The quality they get at an online machine translation site will surely be less that what you could offer, so think about how and where MT might complement your global Web strategy. Don’t put your brand in the hands of an MT Website that you don’t control.
Don DePalma is the founder/chief research officer of the research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory, based in Lowell, MA, and author of “Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing.”
Other articles by Donald A. DePalma:
Global Naming “Gotchas” Trip Up Microsoft and General Motors
Can’t Read, Won’t Buy: Why Language Matters to Global Marketing
What Happens When Going Global Goes Bust?
Knowing When It’s Time to Take Your Brand Abroad
Global Marketing: Money + Web + Local Experience = Success
Global Marketing: Triage and Nuance
Global Marketing: Toe Dippers, Stubbed Toes, and Second Bouncers
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