Nearly half (49%) of executives say that a language barrier stood in the way of major international business deals in the past, according to a report from SDL. Furthermore, 64% of these executives consider language barriers as a major challenge to successfully entering international markets.

The report “Top 5 Reasons Why Enterprises Rely on Machine Translation for Global Expansion” highlights how machine translation (MT) effectively addresses these language barriers in five use cases:

• Online user activity and multilingual engagement
• Global customer service and customer relationship management
• International employee collaboration
• Online security and protection of intellectual property
• Translation capacity and turnaround time for internal teams or agencies

Effective Communication

Communicating with employees and customers in their native languages improves efficiency, increases receptivity, and allows for easier processing of concepts.

Most enterprises with translation departments or language service providers are already benefiting from post-edited MT, where expert human translators improve machine translated text.

The report indicates this approach improves translation capacity and productivity by as much as 30%, noting large enterprises with massive translation volume can increase productivity by a whopping 300%. Furthermore, it also directly reduces translation costs.

The report goes on to cover use cases beyond material handled by internal translation teams or partner vendors.

Real-Time and Dynamic Communication

Human translation teams cannot keep up with dynamic or real-time content. Enterprises can have massive volumes of both, in the form of user-generated content (UGC) and knowledge bases, for instance.

According to the report, MT can affordably translate UGC such as comments, reviews, and forum posts in real-time. Mt can also handle dynamically changing content like knowledge bases.

Furthermore, the report also delved into multilingual customer support and internal team collaboration—both real-time elements that MT can reliably bolster.

Enterprises need to leverage MT to overcome language barriers and thrive in today’s global market. The automatic translation of content in real-time and at large scale through MT offers benefits that human translation cannot match.

SDL’s “Top 5 Reasons Why Enterprises Rely on Machine Translation for Global Expansion” is free to download now.