How are you making your business ‘world-ready’?
Earlier this month, Intento participated in the World-Readiness Contest at the TAUS Massively Multilingual Conference in San Jose — where companies were given a chance to present their ideas on reaching every last human being on the planet in their native language. Konstantin Savenkov, co-founder and CEO, shared Intento’s strategies to help businesses implement language accessibility programs in an effortless and cost-efficient way.
Maintaining language inclusivity in the digital workplace can be a significant challenge for global companies. Keep reading to get the key takeaways from Savenkov’s pitch and learn how to build better accessibility with Intento.
• • •
Adapting to an increasingly multilingual team
Our business practices have been fundamentally altered in the post-COVID digital age. A major factor here is the number of languages spoken within a team. We’ve welcomed a more diverse, remotely distributed workforce that is increasingly multilingual. It’s now common for employees to span several time zones while relying on asynchronous communication in many different languages. Your team may even speak more languages than your customers. Although a given company may sell to a marketplace spanning 10 languages, their employees may natively speak 60.
Greater globalization in the workforce presents a new challenge for enterprises of all shapes and sizes — language accessibility and inclusion.
• • •
What language barriers hold back
According to a Forbes Insights survey, 80% of workers are more productive when the manager communicates in their native language. At the same time, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cites language barriers as a factor in 25% of on-the-job incidents. A lack of English proficiency is a leading factor in 60–90% of corporate knowledge falling by the wayside and 50% of failure in all invites.
• • •
Language accessibility solutions
One way to get around language barriers is to spend time and effort teaching everyone at the company the lingua franca – whether that’s English, French, German, etc. That will involve purchasing language courses or even corporate Duolingo subscriptions — however, more often than not, this leads to employees feeling singled out and even more excluded.
Another way around this is to send your content to a Translation Management System (TMS) to be translated by human translators. Going down this route, you’ll find that human translation is slow and expensive, while intranet content is vast and updates often.
You’ll only end up translating a fraction of the desired content.
• • •
Intento for language accessibility and inclusion
At Intento, we have a better strategy to add a multilingual dimension to all corporate content.
Intento extends and enhances TMS-based workflows to achieve 100% language and content coverage. We provide real-time translations for everything that’s limited either by time or money when using human translators. We offer a real-time cache so you only need to translate each sentence once. At the same time, you can actively improve your machine translation using end-user feedback. To make the multilingual experience completely immersive, we also add a multilingual search function across all English content, immediately translating the results back into the user’s language.
• • •
Unmatched interoperability
The Intento Enterprise Language Hub comes with unmatched interoperability — you won’t need to change anything in your tech or LSP stack. Its simple API can easily integrate with any Knowledge Base (KB) and any TMS system on the market.
Intento has off-the-shelf plug-ins for popular KB systems such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, Zendesk, BMC, and Jira. You can also use Intento as a browser extension, casting a multilingual layer that binds all intranet web applications. We also work with TMS systems to support and extend human workflows.
• • •
Inclusive design choices
Onboarding Intento is a quick and easy way to build better language inclusivity for all your employees. We made crucial design choices to achieve this. We support 125K language pairs across more than 40 MT engines, including 6 Custom NMT platforms, and can control the choice of words by adding glossaries on top of any MT system.
We also provide tools to manage the tone of voice and gender of translations using automatic post-editing. For colloquial content, we integrate profanity and hate speech detection to catch communication issues before they arise.
• • •
Measurability of success
The ROI is pretty simple. Since this is on-demand translation, the primary metric of success comes organically — it’s the amount of content translated by users into their languages. The second metric is seen through user feedback by the number of translation issues explicitly reported.
Based on those two signals (most popular pages and languages and translation issues), the most popular or problematic content can be routed to the good old TMS workflows and fixed by humans.
This way, our solution not only helps to get rid of the translation backlog and translate everything beyond your human translation resources. It also helps to focus your human translation budget on the most popular or complex content.
It’s an unbeatable ROI.
But even that is not the best part. The best part is that when every employee in your company feels included and excited because of something you have implemented, it creates a tremendous level of support for all localization initiatives in the company, much higher than any dollar ROI you may bring.
• • •
To learn more about Intento or to schedule a free demo with one of our experts, please click here.
