In his post about the Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) Leadership Forum in Dublin, Gengo’s co-founder and CEO Matt Romaine mentions that a “recurring theme was a shifting expectation and definition of “quality”. Close to that time, many of us also read Nataly Kelly’s Huffpost article about how the industry is finally moving toward a goal of “right” translation quality as measured by business results.

Many international managers are having to think through this topic, in light of financial considerations and other competing corporate priorities. When targeting the right quality level, you need to take into consideration risk level, brand, content speed and volume, and desired persuasiveness.

What is the content “risk” level?

Are there lives at stake if translation is incorrect? Could an extra space or incorrect punctuation drain accounts or bring on a lawsuit? Think medical device instructions, pharmaceutical labels, airplane maintenance procedures.

For this type of content, high-quality agency translation is best, or perhaps highly trained MT that has been carefully post-edited. But if none of the above are in play, “right” quality can mean faster turnaround and more savings.

Is your brand image at stake?

Are we talking about your beautiful corporate website navigation, your product user interface, your latest advertising campaign? These should be hand-crafted with an agency or carefully post-edited.

They’ll want to select the words painstakingly and review minutely, in artisan fashion. Just what you should want – these brand pieces will leave a lasting image of your company in customers’ eyes, so you have to get it right.

What is the content “speed” and volume?

Is this long-lived, curated, reference-able content? Or fast-flowing, dynamic content that will get superseded by tomorrow’s inflow? When content is “temporary” in the sense that it is flowing past like a river, it may not make business sense to spend the time and money to achieve translation perfection. Or to put it more bluntly, you could go broke trying!

There is an exponentially increasing amount of content in the world today; more and more of it is of the free-flowing, unstructured, social type. Think user reviews, social posts or ecommerce product descriptions and video captions. There’s so much of it and it changes so quickly! We cannot afford to translate this content in the traditional way. But it’s great for crowdsourcing!

Does the content need to be persuasive? Is SEO important?

Imagine that your content is voluminous and dynamic, so you have the translation affordability issue…and you are tempted to machine translate it. Wait! If the content needs to be persuasive or appealing, then sounding like it is written by a human will be critical. Content with a “human voice” is proven to positively affect conversion. Machine translation, amazing as it is, does not yet have the ability to sound natural and human.

Moreover, search engines detect MT and their algorithms do not rank MT content as highly as human translation. So for authentic-sounding, persuasive content, using human-powered translation is still the best. You just want it to be scalable and affordable.

How do we get to “right quality”?

Translation quality is a spectrum. Imagine on the far right end, translation agency perfection: beautiful quality, detailed review, taking time to get it just right. This can require a significant investment. On the far left end, imagine “raw” machine translation: instantaneous, free to all internet users, often useful for gaining quick understanding.

It’s growing and advancing steadily, but still frequently produces odd, funny or just plain hard-to-understand translations. It can be trained and tuned, but at a price that can be hefty.

In between, there is a middle ground. This is where crowd translation, managed with powerful and scalable technology, can shine. This is the space in which Gengo thrives, managing hundreds of millions of words per year, easily, cost-effectively and with the “right” quality.

Go global with Gengo’s people-powered translation platform.

Learn More   or Contact us