Is Machine Translation Software Catching Up?

Breaking geographic barriers and plunging right in middle of information, is what exactly internet has made us capable of. Yet language is an impenetrable access barrier and while machines are doing a good job, when it comes to company documents are they reliable enough yet? With more than 1.8 Billion users surfing the world wide web, only 50 % or less belong to a country where English is a spoken language. Although no denying the fact that internet was actually invented in a predominantly English speaking country, but the span of this facility has extended far and wide with developing nations toppling super powers in internet usage and growth.

The recent curious case of IBM using n.Fluent to have their website translated plus all their official documents in 11 different language is somewhat very intriguing with a global marketer’s point of view. The software that IBM is developing has at least 400,000 of its work force sprinkled across the globe to contribute to creation of this web translation giant. So, it means that once n.Fluent is floated in the market for general consumer usage, it will claim to be powerful enough to takeover other automated translation services like Google Translate etc.

IBM seems to be putting in a lot of man power and resources into developing a translation robot with an ever extensive virtually unlimited language database. But the real point to ponder here is that whether this mechanical translation tool will be good enough to convey the real essence of your marketing message to an international audience? Will the look and feel of this content clearly communicate and appealing to give you a higher conversion rate you’re looking for? Chances are humans will still need to be involved for sometime yet.

There are many questions like these when web marketers like you and me think of introducing a multilingual web platform. These questions have failed to gather a positive response when some marketers tried to apply Google translate API to their websites as their translation interface, but all they gathered was simply a word to word mosaic of errors and most of the users who came across them, simply thought it was spam!

So, what’s the answer if you are looking to get your website prepared for a wider global audience? There are many technical aspects related to this phenomenon but out of them, quality of the content matters the most. Although internet is considered to be a multimedia platform where you can come across textual, visual and voice entities forming up a whole website or portal, but still users still rely more on reading your content and if it is interesting and compelling to them, they convert to a sale and lower down your bounce rate.

So if you are looking to make your mark in any language, then it is important and essential to place only perfectly translated content on your websites preferential pages. Your content is basically your refined marketing message that helps you to connect with the user or in our case, potential sale. It is advisable in this case to go for human translation rather than machine translations because:
1. Human translations if localisation is important to you, then definitely not machine.

2. They help you getting your marketing message delivered to your targeted local market accurately.

3. It helps to solid build consumers trust with your product through your websites content.

There are many business to business translation agencies out in the market which can actually help you in elevating your web content quality, but SEO experts are needed to make sure the content reaches the market. This will definitely provide you with an increase on your ROI as visitor responses improve if  you have put in the effort to create a proper international web presence.