Why Use Language Translation Software?

Volume of Multilingual Content Increases

According to Netcraft Ltd1, there were more than 186 million websites at the end of 2008 compared with 101 million at the end of 2006. As a result, the ever-increasing volume of multilingual web content makes machine translation software a fundamental application for everyday use. Without machine translation software most of these websites would never be translated.

User Demand for Multilingual Content Soars

Each year the number of Internet users increases dramatically. According to comScore, Inc.2, the global Internet audience today has surpassed 1 billion unique visitors, out of which China represents the largest Internet audience. These users seek information in their native language and rely on machine translation to understand foreign language information.

1 http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/01/16/january_2009_web_server_survey.html
2 http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2698

Use of Free Web Translation Services Increase as Corporate Interests Face New Risks

Millions of pages and documents are translated for free every day on the many online translation services, including the most commonly used search engines. This in turn creates confidentiality and security concerns for corporations.

Enterprise Content Expands

The amount of content created and maintained across the enterprise for different initiatives is massive and continues to grow each day. Because human translation is expensive, most of this content remains in one language. SYSTRAN solutions, which can be customized for domain-specific subjects and specific business goals, help the enterprise translate and deliver this content to users worldwide in over 50 languages. Simply put, every company large or small can leverage and monetize existing information and achieve additional return on investment by creating multilingual content from one source document with a SYSTRAN solution.

Gisting or Publishing?

Initial use of machine translation was limited to foreign language information access to get the gist or general understanding of content. As the technology evolved, it created better quality translation results that were suitable for publishing multilingual content. Built-in features to customize specific domains and business objectives along with open APIs for easy integration with third-party applications triggered new corporate deployments of language translation software solutions for publishing within enterprise content management systems.

What Do Customers Want?

MT customers want a cost-effective solution that delivers "good enough" translation quality and saves time.

The expression "good enough", commonly used in enterprise environments, means that translations must reach the company's defined quality threshold. This can be achieved in a number of ways, such as customizing SYSTRAN's software or imposing language consistency and terminology control.

The initial cost to reach the quality threshold for every target domain leverages all available linguistic assets such as glossaries, translation memories and existing translated texts. But companies also need to consider related ongoing costs to improve translation quality of existing domains, or the quality for new target domains. In summary, these investments must be cost-effective.

MT must be accurate, fast on current hardware, easy to maintain, and deliver savings on existing translation costs.