BLOGS
Unlock the Potential of ChatGPT for Global Business Content Localization
June 30, 2023
ChatGPT is a technology that has the potential to revolutionize operations for global businesses, including content localization workflows.
This powerful tool can help you customize and optimize your localization processes. In the right hands, it can help solve many of the common problems companies have when trying to scale their content across markets. With its ability to analyze data and create tailored outputs in an instant, ChatGPT is rapidly becoming one of the most popular tools in many industries.
But many people still have some uncertainties around using ChatGPT. Issues like privacy, accuracy, and reliability are still holding back some people from taking the plunge to using the tool.
Is ChatGPT a useful tool for your content localization?
How can you apply it to your processes?
And should you use it at all?
Here is an introduction to how you can unlock the potential of ChatGPT and similar tools for your global business…
The potential of ChatGPT for global business content localization
If you have come across the idea of using ChatGPT for localization, you have probably heard of using it as a translation tool.
Translation is certainly one use interesting use case. Although ChatGPT isn't a purpose-built machine translation tool, it has some useful extra features that can be helpful for translation. For example, you can give the tool extra context of where your translations will be used so that will give more accurate results for your industry or business.
However, translation is only one application of ChatGPT. Some of the more interesting use cases for localization include using the tool to rewrite content to change the tone, fixing issues before translation, and repurposing translations for different uses.
There is a great potential for ChatGPT in many areas, including quality assurance, customer support chatbots, and employee onboarding.
The advantages and disadvantages of ChatGPT localization
As with any new technology, there are both potential positives and negatives of using ChatGPT in your localization workflow.
5 business-benefits benefits of using ChatGPT
First, the benefits. There are some extremely promising advantages to using AI to improve your streamline your content localization.
Here are 5 benefits that can benefit your global business:
- Improved quality control – Traditionally, quality control is done by human translators, aided by some simple automation tools. Artificial intelligence allows you to add an "extra set of eyes" to your quality assurance process without adding extra manual work, which can help raise the quality of your global content even further.
- Faster localization – Every manual step will slow down your localization process. By replacing the right steps with ChatGPT, you can significantly speed up your localization and get your content out to your markets as soon as possible.
- Reduced costs – There are many ways that ChatGPT can help reduce the cost of localization. Two less obvious ways include reducing the word count of source content so fewer words need to be translated and automatically repurposing content for other platforms.
- Inherent scalability – When your business operates in multiple languages and international markets, scalability is key. Artificial intelligence, when used correctly, is inherently more efficient to scale than manual work. When your workflow is streamlined, adding a new language can become almost effortless.
- Improved consistency – Adding automation almost always contributes to better consistency. For example, you can train ChatGPT to produce the right outputs for one language then apply those rules to all your languages. It's quicker to do this with ChatGPT than it would be with human workers who would require training.
5 common concerns about using ChatGPT
Even if they recognize these benefits, many companies are still not sure about ChatGPT. Usually, you can mitigate these concerns by learning more about the technology and how to use it effectively.
Some common uncertainties include:
- Accuracy concerns — As with any machine translation or artificial intelligence (AI) tool, you can't rely on the output from ChatGPT to be accurate. You always need a human eye to look over the output.
- Copyright questions — It is still a gray area who owns the copyright to content created by AI writing tools. While the user (i.e. you) should own the intellectual property, the tools sometimes replicate whole passages of previously published text. Using the output without checks could lead to you unintentionally infringing someone's copyright.
- Privacy and security — The security issues around ChatGPT are one of the biggest concerns for many people — so much so that the Italian government banned its use for a time. The tool may have used personal data to train its AI model, and there are questions around how user data is reintegrated into the model. This is an area where it helps to get advice from knowledgeable experts.
- Employee displacement — Some people worry they may lose their jobs to tools like ChatGPT. While job displacement is possible if companies don't understand the technology and use it incorrectly, it is unlikely people will be replaced by an AI completely. Instead, ChatGPT is just becoming another tool to improve efficiency.
- Lack of knowledge — You might also just be unsure of ChatGPT because you don't know enough about it. It's worth remembering that ChatGPT has burst onto the scene very quickly! It only launched in November 2022 and immediately gained 100 million users in less than a week.
These concerns are very reasonable. It's okay to have reservations about using AI tools like ChatGPT. However, it's worth looking at how you can start to incorporate AI into your workflow. With the right advice, you can mitigate the potential risks.
How AI can help you customize your localization workflow
One pattern we often see at Rubric is that all processes need to be customized for the particular company and workflow. No tool or system works out of the box.
Natural language AI tools (which is what ChatGPT is) can actually help you in this task of customization. By adding automated steps in your workflow, you can prepare your content for the next step without manual steps.
For example, let's say a software company translates their software interface, user guides, and marketing materials into the French language for the Canadian and French markets.
Some uses of ChatGPT they could consider include automating engineering steps in the localization workflow. For example :
- Parsing of file structures to extract translatable text, especially in poorly structured files which can't be processed with simpler automation.
- Automated generation of user interface screenshots, for use as reference and in quality assurance (QA).
- Automatic linking of translatable segments to labels shown in screenshots.
- Performing QA checks based on a complex prompt. An example prompt might be "Check that the URLs in this translated content are consistent with this spreadsheet which maps source language to target language URLs."
Other potential uses of artificial intelligence tools include:
- Automatically checking and adapting the source content so it meets the company's guidelines before translation.
- Improving the consistency and conciseness of source content to reduce costs. For example, better consistency means not paying twice to translate similar sentences that could be made the same in the source.
- Using AI voices to generate localized voiceover at a lower cost.
- AI transcription to generate subtitles if they are not available in the source video.
- Changing the human translations to suit different audiences or content types.
- Identifying idiomatic expressions and changing them to suit a different market, such as the different uses of French in Canada and France.
- Checking the final localized content for fluency as part of the quality assurance step.
- Rewriting subtitles to reduce the length or word count so they fit better on screen.
How can you find out which automated steps are right for you? It can help to talk to a localization provider that has experience automating steps in localization processes.
Why machine translation prompt engineering is the next major job
A common concern around AI tools is that they will remove jobs from human workers. However, this seems unlikely given the limitations of the technology.
As discussed by AI-localization expert Angelo Passalacqua, "You are not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by someone using AI. If you use ChatGPT regularly, you know you have to coach it."
The task of "coaching" an AI to produce the right output is called prompt engineering and it could just be the next major job across industries.
Prompt engineering involves fine-tuning the inputs into the tool to get the right output for your needs.
For instance, a novice user might instruct ChatGPT to "translate this text into French." However, a more experienced prompt engineer might say "translate this user manual text (written in American English) for Canadian French for a user in the manufacturing industry."
The extra context may provide a more accurate translation, depending on the specifics of the source content. It takes knowledge and skill to create prompts that will produce useful outputs.
How to embrace the power of ChatGPT for content localization
ChatGPT and other natural language tools can be a powerful addition to your localization workflow. However, you need to use them in a strategic way, otherwise they can end up creating more work than they save.
When you adopt AI tools into your business, you can optimize your use of human workers. By reducing manual touches, you pave the way to scale your content for multiple international markets.
The first step is to experiment with tools like ChatGPT, if you haven't already. This will give you a good idea of what the tools are capable of. At the same time, talk with a localization provider about which steps in your process might benefit from automation.
Download our free ebook
33 Content Translation Hacks to Simplify Your Life
THE Cheat Sheet for Content Creators Who Want to Retain Control of Their Translated Content