In a recent podcast episode of Global Ambitions, Yoko Drain of Zendesk talked about the company’s localization strategy for its support pages, centered around the use of machine translation. This strategy makes for a good case study on the advantages of using machine translation today. In particular, we’d like to bring up three lessons to take away from this conversation.
Right off the bat, Drain touches upon one of MT’s main advantages, which is cost. Machine translation is a much more cost-effective option than human translators or even machine translation post-editing (MTPE).
Zendesk’s strategy is to use MT to translate all its support dominican republic mobile database pages, and further process high-traffic pages with MTPE to improve their quality. This is a very smart way of leveraging the cost advantage of machine translation. By prioritizing MTPE funding for higher-traffic pages, Zendesk is able to work within a reasonable budget. They are able to ensure that low-traffic pages still get necessary language support, and they free up resources for human editors on the pages used by more people.