“LLM-powered”, “platform-based”, “smart solutions”… With translation as with all the rest, there is so much noise around AI. We hear a lot about tools and processes and workflows, faster, cheaper. But we hear little about what businesses hope to get from the translations they’re buying. Little on the fact that to be of any value to its buyer, a translation has to be fit for the buyer’s purpose. And very little on how to get there.

So, let’s look at what happens after you or your boss decide to have content translated, and what questions to ask yourself to get the value you need from a translation that will be fit for your purpose.

On solid legal ground

First come the legal issues. By all means, get professional legal advice on all the below if you can. There are still questions that you can ask yourself as a sensible business person when looking at the legal issues relating to written translation.

1) Intellectual property and copyright
Whose IP is it?
Will someone else make money off it?
Who will own the copyright in the translated content?

When you use a machine-translation tool or buy from an AI language service provider, answering these questions involves searching through T&Cs for the clauses on using IP to train LLMs then lengthy negotiations, or having to pay legal fees to have a contract specially drafted then lengthy negotiations.

Instead, you could go for a professional translator. Unlike machines, translators are able to sign a legally-binding document. This document can simply state who owns the original IP and who will hold the copyright in the translation. And humans can include a no-AI clause in their offer, if requested.

2) Confidentiality and data protection
Is it fine for strangers to see this content?
Is there personal or confidential data in it that trigger data protection obligations?
Will you be handing protected data for transfer to not-data-safe countries?

Again, with AI and machine translation, it means legal fine print, lack of control over who will access the data, where it will be stored and processed, and how robust data protection regulations are over there.

With professional translators, you can simply ask them to sign an NDA. They can tell you in what country they’re based too.

Before one word has even been translated, the value of human translation lies in the simplicity and accountability of dealing with identified persons.

Trust in your translation partner

Now, let’s look at the part where content in one language is transformed into equivalent content in another language. Compared to other creative productions where you can at least see for yourself, translation adds another layer of difficulty, because most of the time, you don’t know the output language (or you wouldn’t have needed translation services.)

So you have to use your professional experience and your knowledge of the world to make a judgment: can you trust the translated content to do what you intend it to do?

How do you recognise a translation is fit for your purpose? Here are questions to help with this.

1) Does it speak to your intended audience? In the right language variant (e.g. European French or Canadian French?), with the appropriate tone of voice, using relevant cultural references and avoiding unintentionally funny or offensive terms.

With machine language services, you don’t have information about what materials, written by whom and where, the AI engine was trained on. All you know is that a button was pressed, a machine fired up, and an output was generated.

With a person, you glean information from their CVs, their online profiles, or from a straightforward conversation. As a human, they will have grown up somewhere, gone to school in a specific country. That will give you certainty about what language and language variant they know and translate into.

2) Does the translation trigger the same, intended reaction from the target audience as it did in English?
Agencies: the intended reaction is buying from your client’s international B2B e-commerce store, thanks to accurate product names and descriptions.
Museums: more people visiting from abroad, or international visitors gaining the same knowledge about your exhibits from translated signage.
Tech firms, the buyer of your product following relevant and safe instructions in the user manual.

With AI, you get an accuracy percentage and a disclaimer about hallucinations. Even with a stated accuracy at 95%, you’re left wondering where the 5% of errors will pop up: misrepresenting your services in a webpage header? Crediting Brunel for the Eiffel Tower in museum signage? Telling the technician to now use their third hand to hold your product?

Professional translators have professional qualifications and memberships you can verify. Their client testimonials, the brands in their portfolios will tell you if they’re experienced in the right field. Check if they list similar projects to yours.

3) Does the translation preserve the value you put there? The investment you made in rebranding, the product you developed for a new market, the technical language that instils credibility in your start-up’s presentation to potential investors, the tweaks you made to your content based on data analytics, the existing translated assets you’ll repurpose for another media.

If you tell an AI engine to redo its translation, it will reprocess everything from scratch in its black box, still leaving you in the dark about the quality and efficiency of the output. Yes, it will be fast and appear cheap, but what is it worth if you can’t trust the output?

A professional translator will understand the brief you give them and they will be able to give you explanations at the edits stage and to advise how to reuse your existing translations. The value of working with a professional translator is in traceability and trust: you know what you will get from them because you can engage meaningfully with them.

Talk to a human

Have a conversation human to human, professional to professional! Before translation starts, discuss the scope and volume of the project. To optimise turnaround time and overall cost, define together what part of the content is really business-critical and target that for translation.

Interested in talking translation with a human professional? Get in touch.

If you’re a fellow Bristol Creative Industries, you get a free initial one-hour consult.

About Sandra Mouton – French translator

I translate creative, marketing and technical texts into French: web, print, digital marketing, in-app and in-game content