At blarlo.com, we have many clients from both the online and the offline worlds, although it is increasingly common for clients to have translation needs in both spheres. In this article, we will describe our vision and how we prepare ourselves to manage translation projects for our online clients.
The world of translation is constantly changing, as is communication though electronic media. Communication through electronic media began only 40 years ago—making it a recent development in the history of language—and it varies very dynamically from a personal and business point of view, particularly with the emergence of the internet and mobile phones.
Nowadays, the main way to find services or products is on the internet, the great showcase where people from all over the world look for any service or product they may need. Therefore, content has turned into one of the keys to marketing and sales.
At blarlo.com, our customers rely on us to be prepared for these changes, as the agility of translation processes has never been more important. For this reason, we are preparing for this with the help of a concept that we call the “hybrid intelligence of connected translation”. But before we explain this, let’s look at some factors that influence the technology we’re creating.
The Content
On the one hand, much more content is being generated than at any other time in humanity, in a much faster and more dynamic way. To illustrate this, we present some facts about communication through electronic media and the content that is being created. In 2019, every minute:
- 188 million emails are sent.
- 3.8 million Google searches are carried out.
- 4.5 million videos are viewed on YouTube.
- 90,000 tweets are posted.
- 1 million people are connected on Facebook.
- 1 million dollars are made in e-commerce sales, etc.
The volume of the content we produce is enough to make our heads spin, and it makes translation projects seem impossible to tackle. But at the same time, we can divide the content into smaller entities that make sense individually, such as article descriptions, posts, opinions, tweets, emails, etc. Companies like Amazon have billions of words to translate, which we may classify as individual entities comprised of item descriptions, instructions, services, or customer reviews.
The way content is created has also changed. It is much more dynamic, constantly being updated, and there is a feedback regarding this content creation, which takes place between the creator and the consumer. As content is constantly updated and feedback is sent, it has a life of its own.
Another feature of the content is that it is embedded in a wide variety of sources, in various formats, with different versions, and all this changes from customer to customer, as seen in different e-commerce sites, large global distributors, various social networks, apps for chat, video, newsletters, ebooks, etc.
Globalization and Localization
There’s a process we may call glocalization, where companies are increasingly global, and products and services are increasingly international, but marketing, communication, and delivery are increasingly local.
The bottom line is this: you are either present in the customer’s local language, or you don’t exist at all. Content and products must be localized for customers’ needs. This is the only way the customer will show interest in your product. If you’re not present in your customer’s language, chances are they’ll never find you. And even if they do, 75% of online customers prefer to shop in a store that is displayed in their own language, even if you offer them a better price.
For these reasons, it is usual for some of blarlo.com’s customers to ask us to translate their content in up to 35 different languages.
It is in this environment where we develop our concept on how to efficiently address translation projects and how to solve the challenges posed by the market, and it is in this environment where the primary focus of blarlo.com originates: the hybrid intelligence of connected translation.
The Hybrid Intelligence of Connected Translation
This concept encompasses the services and technologies that allow us to overcome all the challenges faced by the translation industry today.
HYBRID INTELLIGENCE
We define intelligence as the ability to understand and solve problems. In this case, it provides us with the ability to optimally control and manage the entire translation process. The intelligence we apply is hybrid because many of the processes are supported by Artificial Intelligence, but it is complemented by the management of our native team leaders, who know the customers and their needs perfectly; their work helps us manage and feed information back into our system.
To this end, we have designed and continue to work continuously on our technological platform that we call T.O.P. (Translation Optimization Platform) with the goal of:
- automatically detecting changes or new content created by the customer and which needs to be translated in any of their information sources, such as new products in their e-commerce site, in their blog, in their terms of use, in their social media profiles, or in their help desk;
- separating the content from the format, to allow translators to work with plain text, which facilitates and streamlines the translation process and prevents design flaws;
- if necessary, optimally dividing content into microprojects that can be tackled by multiple translators simultaneously;
- preparing memories and glossaries automatically;
- assigning the most professional and trained translators to each specific text, taking into account the client’s knowledge and specialty;
- controlling the times, the consistency of texts and terms, as well as the final quality review;
- reapplying all original formats to texts that have already been translated;
- evaluating the quality of the work and the translators.
CONNECTED
In a dynamic and global world, the connection between customers, consumers, content, and translators is vital in the optimization of translation processes.
Customers
Numerous clients have multiple departments that require translation services such as legal, marketing, support, e-commerce, etc., each with completely different ways of working and needs that depend on the volume of the content they generate, the specialization, and the content format. Each department is a world unto itself, with needs to be met, but there must be a single point of connection where each customer can manage and monitor their translations independently, but where, at the same time, the whole process can be analyzed globally within the company so as to be able to oversee all projects and costs.
The needs arising from departments that are very different but from the same customer account need to be met with a coherence, consistency, and control that is only possible if all the customer’s needs are connected to the right translators and if the entire translation process is overseen from a single point: blarlo.
Consumers
The content lifecycle is much more dynamic and new players join the generation of said content: now users interact, participate, and create content so that the process becomes cyclical.
In many cases, it is necessary to connect these sources of information generation such as opinions, recommendations, user help desks, or social networks to translation processes to improve the service and increase user satisfaction and conversion rates.
The user’s needs change, and we must be prepared to generate content that responds to their demands at all times.
Again, technology plays a key role at this point in the process.
Content
As mentioned earlier, we have more and more sources of content, the formats are more variable, and the generation of various pieces of content occurs very often in real time.
Connecting to the origins of the content is critical to competing in the globalized world of the internet. Speed is a fundamental value. It is necessary to connect to all the sources of the customer’s content to be informed of the changes in real time and translate it in an agile process that allows us to keep the users who demanded it in the first place informed.
It is vital to generate APIs (application programming interface) to connect to the content so that it can be returned to the already translated application. We work on developing connectors with:
– blogs, web pages, wikis, intranets, content managers;
– online stores, e-commerce platforms;
– social networks;
– customer support or sales applications;
– instant messaging and email systems;
– online training platforms.
Translators
The volume of content, the diversity of languages used, and the response time that the market demands mean that it is often no longer possible to have a single trusted translator and that it is necessary to create translation teams for the same project.
At blarlo, we have translators from all over the world collaborate on the same project. To do this, it is necessary to look for the translation talent where it is located, since many specialized translators reside in their countries of origin. Moreover, residing in the country to which the content is being localized is valuable in and of itself, as it allows the translator to be much more in touch with the culture and current happenings in the country. The details are what allow you to differentiate between a good translation and an excellent translation.
For some translation services such as customer support or user help desks of large multinationals, translation services must be offered 24 hours a day, making it essential to have translators for the same language located in different time zones.
Therefore, having a worldwide network of efficiently connected professional translators is a key factor in providing a global service to customers. All blarlo.com translators work connected to the T.O.P., where they are assigned jobs, have access to all the project information, and manage the entire translation lifecycle.
The quality of the jobs and efficiency of the translators are evaluated by AI and by the clients, and the best translators get more work.
TRANSLATION
The translation process is a process in constant digitization and transformation, adapting to the needs of digital communication and the challenges of new digital businesses.
Never before has history generated so much information to be translated, in so many formats, so quickly and with so many markets and languages to reach.
The challenges to the connection, scalability, agility, security, and privacy needs of translation platforms have never been so great and have only just begun.
At blarlo.com, we work in the automation of the entire translation process, in order to cover the market’s latest needs, but always ensuring that behind all the technology and translation, we provide the talent of the best native professional translators who collaborate with us from anywhere in the world on a daily basis. A big thanks to them for all the work they do!
In another article, we’ll tell you more about the T.O.P. (Translation Optimization Platform), which supports the whole concept of “hybrid intelligence of connected translation” and where we try to solve all the technological issues of the concept that we have presented in today’s article.
In the end, all our work boils down to simplifying a process so that when a customer creates a new product or content, the entire process is automated and is less time-consuming—regardless of volume—and the customer may be marketing their product or content in all languages automatically but with full control of the process and the highest quality. Seen like that, it doesn’t seem very complex, but it’s an incredible challenge. J
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