The Utility and Drawbacks of Translation Apps is an interesting topic to discover. Globalization and digital communication have transformed the scope and way of doing business. With the rapid growth of the online market, selling products or services to a global customer base is no longer limited within a certain geographical location or limited to only a few large corporations. For capturing these unprecedented business opportunities, an increasing number of startup companies are entering the global market to offer their goods or services worldwide. Therefore, they struggle to overcome the language barriers, and the demand for translation is increasing.
Companies seek high-quality translation services for their website content, marketing, promotional materials, product catalogs, manuals, and even training material. Moreover, there are many more issues that need to translate appropriately to make sense to your new target market. As a result, the demand for clear, precise, effective, and contextual translation services increases. Your business success depends on selecting the right translation service from a reputed and experienced service provider; otherwise, many things can go wrong due to misinterpretation and create a communication gap.
Wrong translation can harm your business in many ways, such as financial loss, damaged reputation, and make your business vulnerable to competitors. Consequently, to survive and sustain in the global competition, companies spend a huge amount of money on translation services to avoid miscommunication with their stakeholders such as customers, vendors, partners, agents, and government agencies. According to a global survey, enterprises’ yearly expenditure on translation services is growing and will reach $45 billion by 2020.
The Utility and Drawbacks of Translation Apps:
The rise in globalization and technological advancement has led to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) cutting down translation services. Today, we enjoy AI-empowered translation services apps like Google Translate, Amazon Translate, and Microsoft Translator that have highly evolved recently to deliver more accurate translation. Here we are going to discuss the utility and drawbacks of translation apps. The recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) and neural machine translation algorithms have made the translation apps more accurate and effective than earlier.
The Utility and Drawbacks of Translation AppsMoreover, this change has created businesses’ demand to find the right app development agency that guides them to find an effective translation app. The translation results of translation apps are good enough for a business to translate their web pages or product descriptions for normal surfing. Often these services are free, and the service provider shows ads. However, when a company wants to create a user manual in a foreign language, translate a legal or tax document, or developing a user interface for an application in a new language, the company requires error-free, proper translation.
In this case, they can still use the translation apps for the initial stage and afterward hire a human translator to refined the translation results. Similarly, these tools can’t yet analyze the grammar comprehensively, deconstruct the text, distinguish the meaning with cultural variations, concepts, nuances, and abstractions. For example, in the German language, “Bitte” has several meanings in many contexts and has formal and informal use. Similarly, “Bitte” can be used as “Please” or “Here you are” or “Welcome” and so on. In many cases, Translation apps like Google Translator miss these different meanings.
Translation Apps are Empowering and Making Lives Easier:
In recent years the translation apps have improved remarkably. The integration of voice recognition technology enables the application to convert words and phrases as anyone speaks into text or audio format. It is fascinating as it utilizes AI to learn new things and patterns. The more people use it, the more apps learn more and better interpret text and sound. There are verities of translation apps in terms of features, functionality, user interface, and price. Depend on the environment, used words, talking speed, and dialect primarily determines the app’s results.
For example, some apps perform better in German translation, but the same apps can perform poorly in French. Similarly, other apps may be more accurate than others with technical words but perform poorly with cooking terms. If you want the best out of the voice-recognition application, you need to speak a bit slowly and use short, simple sentences. The Apps help companies reach out to the new target markets and serve people globally in retail businesses and service sectors. Smaller companies and startup businesses find it suitable to market their products/services worldwide without bearing the high translation costs.
No wonder the apps may still sometimes give you some funny results, but they are accurate in cases of basic translation. Translator apps on a smartphone are easy to use, which made the world a Global village. Traveling has become very easy now without worrying about language barriers to communicate in a foreign language. Image or Visual translation features in mobile apps have taken the translation service to a more continent level. As a result, you can take a picture or point your smartphone camera to any text in a foreign language to see the instant translation results.
The Future of Translation Apps:
Many companies like Twitter, Facebook, Skype, eBay, and WeChat are integrating translation features to enhance their interface and usability worldwide. So, the demand for translation apps is increasing day by day, and it will have huge opportunities in the future. After the development of visual translation, we are taking advantage of Google Glass that involves the process of keeping your head still, simultaneously pointing at a foreign test, and then commanding, “Ok Glass, translate this for me.” Likewise, HP has invested in SpeechTrans, a startup company that will facilitate real-time translation of conference calls and ongoing business meetings.
These advanced technologies and tools may not entirely substitute human translation in the high-end global market. However, in the future, they will be more useful in satisfying the requirements of translation in engineering, law, healthcare, and the IT industry.
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