How AI Is Revolutionizing Marketing Content Translation

Marketing content has long been difficult to translate. Packed with cultural nuances and emotive language, even the most skilled of linguists can struggle to deliver quality translations that strike the right note with new audiences. Recently, more and more people have been looking toward AI for marketing content translation tasks. Once considered unreliable and unusable without the focused supervision of human translators, AI translations are becoming increasingly accurate and reliable.

The Growing Challenge of Multilingual Marketing Content

Nowadays, even the smallest brand can compete on the world stage. Whether you’re looking to capitalize on untapped markets and secure new revenue streams or you’ve reached the saturation point at home, it’s time to look to new horizons. Whether you’re localizing for one new territory or gearing up for globalization, multilingual marketing content should be at the forefront of your campaign.

For companies with limited resources and a lack of localization insight, it’s tempting to lean heavily on existing marketing collateral. However, while this material can serve as a useful guideline and benchmark for your localization efforts, you’ll need to rethink your approach to marketing for every market you’re looking to penetrate.

Producing multilingual marketing content that resonates is a challenge. Here, you’re doing more than simply translating content from one language into another. Instead, content needs to undergo a rigorous localization process. Precise cultural nuances must be observed, brand consistency maintained, and regulatory compliance ensured. However, these are just a few of the pain points you’ll encounter when it comes to creating multilingual marketing content.

Cost and Budget Constraints

When you’re working to a tight budget, it’s tempting to use translation services that don’t quite cut it. While they might be able to help you protect the bottom line, these low-cost translation services can be detrimental to the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Cheaper machine translation tools might deliver semi-reliable translations, but they tend to fall short when achieving cultural nuance and contextual accuracy. When it comes to marketing content, this simply won’t do.

To overcome this, it’s important to prioritize key markets. With these markets identified, you can focus higher-cost resources on the right markets, where localization will yield the biggest impact. Ultimately, you’ll need to invest in professional language service providers that offer cost-effective, high-quality results.

Consistency Across Marketing Channels

Maintaining high levels of consistency across channels is vital for brand identity. However, it can be difficult to manage terminology across multiple channels when translating at scale. By prioritizing your core marketing channels, you might be fairly confident that you’re getting your message across. However, if your social media platforms and other marketing channels have been sidelined during the localization process, it’s easy for inconsistencies to emerge.

It’s a Time-Intensive Process

When effectively executed, multilingual content marketing brings many benefits, with increased customer engagement and extended reach chief among them. However, it also comes with significant time and resource challenges. Basic translations can put a significant strain on your resources, with full-scale localization requiring even more investment. If you want to do localization right, you’ll need to allot time for translations, editing, quality assurance, and user testing.

Understanding AI Translation for Marketing Materials

Many people dismiss AI translation as little more than an extension of machine translation (MT). While there’s some overlap, AI translation is far more involved than what you can expect from standard MT. Generally speaking, a comprehensive suite of advanced tools is used to deliver increasingly reliable translations that are nearly as accurate as those produced by a human linguist.

With machine translation, there’s little comprehension of the words and phrases that are input for translation. Rather than understand the nuance of language and the meaning of a sentence, machine learning instead utilizes resources like dictionaries.

AI translation goes much further than machine translation by using machine learning and neural networks. Thanks to these, AI translation can better comprehend sentence meaning. All elements of a sentence are broken down and assessed, including context and structure. Not only does this result in more precise translations, but it also tends to deliver more readable results.

How Does AI Handle Marketing-Specific Language Challenges?

Marketing material is distinct from other copy you might be using elsewhere. It’s typically more emotive, with sentences carefully crafted to resonate with audiences. In the past, relying solely on machine translation to handle marketing translations was a no-go. Basic machine translation tools struggle to capture the nuances of emotive messaging, resulting in awkward-sounding language that fails to strike the right chord with customers.

Fortunately, AI translation technologies have emerged to cover the shortfall left behind by second-rate machine translation tools. New and improved AI-enabled machine translation tools utilize things like deep learning to produce increasingly reliable and readable results. Adaptive machine learning is another useful tool, with AI systems becoming more proficient over time by learning from human-generated corrections.

When it comes to preparing marketing content for new audiences, time is usually of the essence. AI translation tools like neural machine translation (NMT) allow you to translate and localize at speed and scale, making it easy to make your mark in multiple territories at once. Worried about consistency across channels? With translation memory (TM) tools, content remains consistent across every platform when using AI translation.

Key Benefits of AI-Powered Marketing Content Translation

Eyeing up a marketing content translation campaign? Unleashing the potential of AI brings many benefits. With AI-powered solutions, you can drastically speed up your time to market, bring down costs, and ensure consistency across all of your campaigns. What’s more, you have a scalable solution that can be amped up when you’re ready to expand the scope of your project or move into new markets.

Speed and Efficiency Gains

Looking to translate a significant amount of marketing material quickly? Undertaking this task manually with linguists can prove incredibly time-consuming. The process can run even slower if you’re also translating other assets, such as website content. With AI-powered translation tools, you can expedite the process considerably. Machine translation tools can bring major efficiency gains to your operation, allowing you to translate at scale and leave your linguists free to focus on the finer points of localization.

A Cost-Effective Solution

Leaning solely on human translators can prove an expensive endeavour. While you’ll want linguists to form part of the process, your workflows should be largely facilitated by AI-powered tools and tech. Machine-generated translations can make quick work of large volumes of translated text, leaving your translator teams plenty of time to finesse output to ensure everything resonates as it should with audiences. This hybrid approach guarantees consistently high quality across every translation, without you having to increase your headcount.

It’s Scalable

First time thinking about localization? You’re probably doing the smart thing and starting small. However, after your first taste of success, you’ll be itching to target fresh audiences in new territories. With AI translation, you have a scalable tool that can instantly grow to meet the demands of your localization projects. Extend the reach of an existing campaign, or start raking in revenues by targeting your efforts on untapped markets.

Consistency Across Campaigns

Remaining consistent across translations can prove tricky if you’re relying on human translators. Centralised glossaries can help, but the margin for human error remains high. With AI translation, it’s easier than ever to remain consistent, no matter how many languages you’re working in. Everything from basic terminology to technical terms remains identical across the board, resulting in more cohesive marketing messaging.

Maintain Brand Voice Across Languages

AI translation doesn’t just ensure terms remain consistent across translations. It can also help preserve your brand of voice. Once you’ve locked in your brand voice, the best translation tools can help preserve it across every platform, including your marketing channels. Advanced AI language models can be trained on your brand voice, with continuous improvement ensuring near pitch-perfect translations.

Common Pitfalls When Using AI for Marketing Content Translation

AI translation tools boast great potential. However, they’re far from perfect and need to be utilized carefully when translating marketing content. AI translation can struggle when it comes to cultural nuance and handling idioms, meaning humans can never be completely removed from the equation. Below, we’ll take a closer look at the most common pitfalls you’re likely to encounter when using AI for marketing content translation.

Cultural Nuance Challenges

Human translators are proficient at capturing cultural understanding and nuance. However, even the best AI translation tools can struggle in this regard. With a dependence on patterns and pre-existing translations, it’s all too easy for AI translation to misfire when it comes to handling things like idiomatic expressions, slang, humor, and sarcasm. This ultimately results in translations that are inaccurate, misleading, or offensive.

Idiom Handling

AI translation might be growing more proficient all the time, but it still has a way to go when it comes to translating idioms and slang. These rarely have direct translations, with the result being that meaning is lost completely from the output text.

Humor

Just because you might find something funny, don’t assume you’ll be raising a smile on the other side of the planet. Humor is incredibly culture-specific, with even the most experienced translator struggling to capture the punchline of a joke or the essence of sarcasm. AI has particular trouble managing humor and sarcasm, with the content of jokes often misinterpreted and punchlines misunderstood entirely.

Formality

Marketing content is rarely formal, but that’s not to say a degree of formality needs to be observed. Formality conventions vary between cultures and different languages, with AI translation tools not always able to reproduce them accurately.

AI Translation Tools Aren’t Perfect

While AI translation is becoming increasingly adept, it’s far from a perfect solution. While it’s useful for translating at speed and scale, AI translation will generally encounter hurdles when it comes to capturing cultural nuance. Ultimately, this calls for the intervention of human linguists to ensure marketing content lands as it should, every time.

Best Practices for Implementing AI in Your Marketing Translation Workflow

The first step in implementing AI into your marketing translation workflows is to assess your content, with some content better suited to AI translation than others. When separating out marketing content for translation, you’ll want to bear in mind available budget and time constraints. Quality requirements are also worth considering, with the bar being high when it comes to marketing content. Now, you can think about preparing your content for the next steps.

Preparing Source Content

It’s generally a good idea to revise marketing content slightly to ensure the best results from AI translation. Sift through your content to ensure plain language is used whenever possible, removing instances of idioms, slang, and jargon wherever possible. You’ll also want to ensure that the wording is as concise as possible. Ideally, marketing content should also be written in active voice for improved translation accuracy. It’s also important to ensure proper grammar and punctuation are used, while including consistent terminology will also help AI translation engines.

Refine Your Review Processes

Even if you’re confident in the abilities of your AI translation tools, never assume that generated text is ready for end users. Rather than relying on this first draft of translations, rethink your translation workflows to ensure optimal quality across the board. Start by using machine translation to generate translated text, before handing the baton on to human linguists to carry out an edit that checks for overall accuracy, tone of voice, and adherence to style guidelines.

How Blend’s AI Translation Solution Transforms Marketing Content Management

Eager to embrace automation? Whether you’re looking to translate at scale or speed up your localization workflows, AI translation is the way forward. At BLEND, you’ll find a first-rate AI translation solution that will make quick work of translating your marketing content from one language into another.

Our flexible AI solutions deliver first-rate results every time. Bringing together all the best AI translation technologies, including machine translation and large language models (LLMs), our AI translations are trained on more than 25 years of quality data produced by some of the best linguists in the business. You can also look forward to seamless API integration, meaning the translation process syncs perfectly with your existing content workflows.

Interested in learning more about what BLEND’s AI-powered translation solutions can do for you? Get in touch with the team today to discuss your project in more detail.