I recently sat in on a webinar sponsored by Localise on AI and localization. It was very interesting and you can check it out here.
I wanted to share a few key slides…
First, more than 80% of AI translations are approved by human reviewers without any needed edits:
For those of you thinking that it will take years before AI translations are ready to be presented directly to users, that time is now. Or yesterday.
And, yes, I know that context is everything and that AI requires quality input before it can generate quality output. But it’s hard to argue with this number as another sign that AI has massive potential for unlocking vast quantities of previously untranslated content.
Equally interesting is the next slide, as it’s also commonly assumed that human translation requires very little human editing. In other words, if we relied on humans we wouldn’t be stuck at 81%, we’d be much closer to 100%.
But consider this:
Even with human translators and human reviewers, only 90% of translation makes it through without editing. So we’re looking at a delta of ~9% between humans and AI.
Now, where does this leave human translators?
It means moving up the value curve.
The future for translators who embrace AI is bright. AI has a role to play in taking care of the grunt work, freeing human translators to do higher-value translation and localization.
As I noted in my previous post, we are in the calm before the storm. AI is the storm.