How real time translation can overcome language and cultural barriers

Since ancient times, the peoples of the world have encountered deep barriers in communicating with each other due to language differences. Social, political, and commercial relations between people from different nations and cultural backgrounds still require the translation of content into each other's languages.

In business relationships, the English language has become a reference point in both verbal and written communication, but it has certainly not solved many limitations related to the user experience.

Fortunately, in recent years, machine translation software has progressed significantly, especially thanks to the contribution of Artificial Intelligence language understanding techniques. The result of this valuable technological collaboration allows us to translate content in real time, in many languages, with increasingly credible results.

Translations tailored to the needs of each company

The first online translators already had a very rich vocabulary but returned unnatural results due to a limited understanding of the language.

A text of even medium complexity had little chance of being credibly translated without a native reader realizing that the content could not be the work of a human. Today, things have changed.

Thanks to Machine Learning techniques, Artificial Intelligence learns more and more the grammatical logic of many languages. More importantly, AI learns to understand the way people communicate thanks to a cocktail of cognitive technologies, including the infamous NLP (natural language processing).

If you use Word, you will probably have used its built-in translator many times before, which enables you to obtain good results in real time, provided you have an Internet connection. The software's translation module uses the computational resources of the cloud for both AI functionality and processing power.

The component structure of modern e-mail and chat applications allows fully functional customized translation modules to be integrated with relative ease. The datasets used to train the AI models can be customized to take into account the specific needs of each company with regard to tone of voice, communication style and lexicon in its business environment.

Thanks to an 'intelligent' translator, it is now possible to translate huge amounts of text from written and verbal communication into many languages when interacting with customers. An essential ally for the CRM of any globally active company.

Future scenarios of AI-based translation: inclusion and speed on huge amounts of data

Although the level of current AI-based translators is such that their performance and potential is objectively difficult to give up, what awaits us in the future will be nothing short of sensational. Meta AI, the research and development unit for cognitive technologies at Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg's social VR holding company, recently presented the prototype of an unprecedented technology.

Current real-time translators use English as the reference language, from which they derive 'one on one' versions of the text in the various supported languages. Although AI has enabled enormous progress, this method is certainly perfectible.

Meta AI offers a more evolved and natural 'many-to-many' approach, capable of directly translating content into any language without having to switch to English. It is therefore a real generational leap, in terms of performance and expressive potential.

On the cognitive technology front, more research is currently underway to eliminate the textual transcription of voice conversations altogether. This will allow direct translation of the audio content of conversations, making the process faster and faster. The user experience of our conversations will become more and more real time, regardless of the language we intend to use.

These developments will allow translations to become increasingly natural and transparent from the point of view of the user interface, to the point where we will probably no longer even notice that we are dealing with a translation system.

The big challenge will be to make the UX of translation systems based on increasingly human-like intelligence more immersive, so as to overcome language barriers forever. Inclusive communication between people all over the world is a dream that is finally becoming reality.