3 KEY SCENARIOS OF USING MACHINE TRANSLATION FOR DIFFERENT CONTENT TYPES.

Use raw machine translation for low-impact and unambiguous content.

Machine translation is said to be “raw” when the output doesn’t undergo human revision.
• Low-visibility or low-traffic content, such as internal documentation, website footers, social
media posts for sentiment analysis, etc.
• Repetitive technical content that doesn’t need to be 100% accurate, just actionable, like
instruction manuals.
• User-generated content like product reviews.
• Quickly perishable content, like chat or email support messages, customer enquiries, etc.
• Large bulks of content with a short turn-around, such as hundreds of product descriptions that
need to go live quickly.
• Frequently amended content like feature and information updates

If you decide in favor of raw machine translation, it’s vital to ensure that you use the best performing
machine translation engine for your language pair and content. This requires significant testing or use
of an integrated auto-selection functionality.

Apply light or full post-editing to more sensitive content.

For quality purposes, some content types and situations require post-editing of machine translation
output by a human translator. This editing can be either light (LPE) or full (FPE).
Good news: You can aid the work of post-editors with traditional translation technology such as
glossaries, termbases, and translation memories.This will keep the key messaging consistent across
cultures and languages and is very feasible with MTPE (Machine Translation Post Editing).
Modern technology also makes it possible to identify and estimate the quality of machine translation
output to focus post-editing resources where they’re most needed. Nevertheless, as a general
guideline, the below cases require MTPE:
• Product titles: They are highly informative and concise, they tend to contain proper names and
polysemous words, and their word order is usually relatively free, which can cause ambiguity.
• Translations between language pairs of dissimilar syntax, like Japanese and Spanish, because
the reordering of words and phrases to well-formed sentences becomes more challenging for
machine translation engines.
• Product descriptions: They need to be well-crafted and clearly state the product’s features or
benefits without room for ambiguity.
• Content of medium visibility that needs to be as accurate as possible: knowledge base, FAQs,
alerts, etc.
• Back-end SEO meta information such as image alt texts and captions: While their visibility is low,
a human needs to ensure that the target-language keywords are present.
Stick to human translation when branding and culture come into play.
Brand-sensitive, high-traffic, and durable assets are best left in the hands of human experts. In other
words, you should decide against machine translation whenever the aim is to persuade, delight, or
reassure the reader.
In these cases, a human translator will need to recreate the message in the target language in a non-
literal way. It’s the case of:
• Homepages, landing pages, and high-visibility website
• Blog posts
• Client-oriented newsletters
• Press releases
• Print and digital advertising
• SEO content
Moreover, when the information you need to translate is sensitive or confidential, such as legal or
contractual documentation, you are also better off assigning it to a human translator.