If you support customer across the globe and don’t have machine translation as part of your localization strategy… you might be missing something.
Localization has become critical as many companies’ growth opportunities are not in their home country or in English-speaking countries. Localization and translation has been a discussion in Consortium meetings for some time and we continue to partner with TAUS (Translation Automation Users Society) on this topic. The TAUS membership represents a collection of practitioners and vendors who are experts in the business of translation and a major focus of TAUS is the use of machine translation (MT) as a key element in a localization strategy. MT has come a long way in the past five years. There are an increasing number of companies successfully deploying MT.
While MT is not perfect, it is proving to be sufficient for support content. As it turns out, the majority of customer demand for support is satisfied by the availability of content, not necessarily people. MT offers a quick, cost effective way to provide more content in the customer context (language), thereby increasing customer success with self-service.
TAUS is hosting their annual conference in Portland OR, October 14-15, 2013. The agenda includes lots of examples of successful use of MT for support content. Consortium members can attend the event at the TAUS member rate (50% off the non-member rate). The TAUS conference agenda and registration information is on the web at https://www.taus.net/conferences/taus-user-conference-2013