Last week, Intento hosted its first webinar, bringing together speakers from Nike, Stripe, GAP, Procore, NetApp, Wish, AstraZeneca, and Esri to discuss the biggest topics in the world of machine translation from 2022 and plans for 2023. They shared a mix of real-life customer stories, reflections on MT ROI, machine voice, the expanding role of localization teams, and more.
The webinar was broken down into two panel discussions — the first centered on demonstrating MT value across the enterprise. Here, we heard from Pascale Trembley (Director of Localization GAP), Zach Duncan (Localization Program Manager, Stripe), Theresa Heim-Stohler (Sr. Ops. Manager, Localization and Vendor Management, Nike), and Brock Hansen (Globalization Programs and Solutions Manager, Wish).
Keep reading for a quick summary of their discussion. They identify the biggest impacts MT has had on their organizations, explore measuring MT value and ROI, discuss internal objections around MT, and the broadening scope of MT into new use cases.
If you enjoy this preview of everything this group has to share, you can watch a recording of their panel here for all of their insights.
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The impact of machine translation
For GAP, Pascale Trembley says that the impact of MT has been about scalability, speed, and communication.
GAP first turned to MT out of necessity. The company uses highly specialized content and was challenged to deploy an overwhelming project with a word count in a number of languages that was humanly impossible to do. So they turned to MT, and despite being novices, the project was a success, and they received incredible feedback from their internal teams.
In terms of scalability, the success of this first project helped GAP realize how much more could be done with the same amount of resources at their disposal, if not less. It also increased the scope of business use cases to leverage MT and other AI applications. They began to learn how to orchestrate AI — and where to place humans into the loop.
With the pandemic came a greater focus on communication. The experience with MT facilitated communication between both employees and customers, and this provided a lot more flexibility for the GAP Customer Support teams.
Working with other departments to measure the value of MT and prove ROI
Stripe’s Zach Duncan says it’s about re-positioning the conversation to show other departments that MT is opening doors and checking the boxes traditional models were unable to. Once someone understands the complexity and constraints of traditional localization, they become open to an alternative solution. MT is opening up pathways to completely new possibilities, and you’re completely changing the conversation of what the localization team can provide.
Internal objections around MT
At Nike, Theresa Heim-Stohler and the localization operations team was hesitant to use MT on highly creative and consumer-facing content because of the possible risk to their brand. After 5 years without making much development in their MT program, they were under the impression that the technology wasn’t right for such cases. After researching the current state of the MT landscape, they realize that they need to invest in developing their program in this direction to match the savings they’ve seen in other use cases.
The most exciting use cases for MT beyond traditional localization workflows
Brock Hansen from Wish is most excited about how developments in source-quality improvement will affect the Wish marketplace. With both international vendors and buyers, there is often layer after layer of MT with worsening quality — making for some less-than-ideal results. Source quality improvement will provide much better translations on the front end so that the end results will drastically improve. At the same time, they’re also excited about how the video-based global marketplace will improve with speech technologies and MT.
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To hear what everyone has to say about the impact of machine translation, measuring the value of MT, internal objections around MT, and what exciting use cases are next for their MT programs — click here to view the entire recording.
You’ll be able to see their full discussion and will also have the opportunity to watch the second panel of the webinar (Coming Into Focus — the MT Future), an exploration into image generators, and a keynote presentation from Intento CEO Konstantin Savenkov.
