How MT is Breaking Down Language Barriers for Day-to-Day Users & Consumers

For global businesses, Machine Translation (MT) is becoming an increasingly favorite method of translation to equip their translator teams with a tool that will get smarter and more accurate over time, helping their localization teams produce more efficient international content for their global products and properties. However, what about those companies that haven’t taken steps to take their business global yet? What happens when you get a global visitor who doesn’t speak the native language that the site is in? Here’s where consumer translation and localization apps come in. And recent news of up-and-coming translation innovations reveals that MT is indeed paving the way for everyday users to engage with global content.

With the rise of Machine Translation and its increasing number of applications and use cases for businesses, it’s also important to keep tabs on the user apps that are arising to break down the global barriers for day-to-day visitors, users, and consumers. So in this next post of our #MachineTranslation series, we take a closer look at how MT is enabling translation at scale on a consumer level, helping them better connect with global languages and businesses.

Enabling Users to Connect with Global Businesses

In the world of applications that help people translate everyday content, they may run into that isn’t in their native language, Google and its translation suite is a popular one. From this suite, Google Chrome users may be familiar with and using the extension that allows users to quickly translate phrases and websites in-app. Now, recent news reveals that this won’t be the only option available to people looking for a quick translate in-browser.

Mozilla is adding a privacy-focused translation app to their Firefox browser, as reported by PCMag. In practice, here’s what it looks like: before, if you needed to “translate a web page in Firefox, an add-on or visit to another website was required.” Now, “Mozilla is set to add translation as a standard feature of its browser along with the added benefit of complete privacy.” The privacy component is particularly interesting as this means that “the language translations will happen client-side and remain completely private, unlike Chrome, which does the translation in the cloud and shares the text with Google’s server.

Another recent example is the rise of a new kind of device that was birthed in the age of Machine Translation: the CM Translator. Also known as “the ideal device for anyone too lazy to learn a new language,” as reported by Mashable. Another recent example is the rise of a new kind of device that was birthed in the age of Machine Translation: the CM Translator. Also known as “the ideal device for anyone too lazy to learn a new language,” as reported by Mashable. “The CM Translator, in particular, is like a traveler’s dream. It’s a tiny black remote, about the size of your Apple TV remote, with a single button that magically translates your speech into other languages.” Of course, this ‘magic’ that Mashable is referring to is Machine Translation; made possible by AI and smarter, more automated, and eventually more accurate methods of localization.

Breaking Down Global Barriers with MT

As these innovations continue to arise and evolve, they will further equip day-to-day global users with some simple tools that will make understanding global content (not written in their native language) a bit easier.  Global language comprehension workarounds like these new extensions and apps are not only made possible today through Machine Translation but continually refined due to the training and algorithms that feed into the MT platform to make its translations even more accurate and valuable over time. As a result, MT is breaking down more language barriers for the everyday user, and helping to bridge that gap between companies that have not yet taken control of their localization initiatives, and their global customers and communities looking to engage with their brand.