A few days ago, Google released its Enterprise Translation Hub. It’s a significant bet on this new enterprise software category. They have tried bringing translation closer to business users in the past (see Google Translator Toolkit). However, this is their first enterprise product.
Features
Pricing
There are a couple of interesting points to look at:
- It provides an MTQP (MT Quality Prediction) score for translations. It would be great to see it appearing in the Google AutoML API too.
- The price goes from $.15 (stock models) to $.5 (custom models) per page. We all know a standard page fits 1,800 characters with spaces. When averaged across corporate documentation, it’s likely to be less (think presentations and tables of content). Still, even with 1,800 it makes the translation price $83 per 1M characters for stock Google MT and $278 per 1M characters for Google AutoML models. It’s about 4x more expensive than standalone Google MT, which validates the point that bringing AI to the end user has a tremendous value-add.
- It provides a post-editing functionality, but it has to happen in the Google UI.
- As of today, it lacks any interoperability with other solutions, human workflows, TMS, and other players of the vast 50B Translation Industry. It would require customers to take a leap of faith to forfeit what they have built or keep their other resources (MT models and LSP partners) separate from this document translation solution.
Google product nicely highlights the key advantages of Intento Enterprise MT Hub:
- Interoperability, which enables our customers to work with 40+ different MT systems, 15+ translation management systems, and thousands of language service providers using those systems.
- A vast range of solutions beyond document translation portals: customer service software, live chats, knowledge bases, community portals, office productivity tools, and many more.
- Surprisingly, we charge less, too. But that we can fix in 2023 pricing.
Overall, this new product from Google marks a significant trend. Machine Translation turns from being a loss leader for major cloud providers to being a revenue driver. We at Intento are eager to see the same moves from other major players and are excited to be the leader in this emerging category.
