Is Artificial Intelligence Going to Make Localization Easier?

The recent explosion of interest in artificial intelligence (AI) shows that many people around the world are genuinely interested in how this technology could change our lives. However, AI also performs a vital role in the increasingly important task of localizing websites and business offers.

What Is Localization?

This is a process that companies need to carry out to tailor their websites, marketing campaigns, and social media posts to different markets. With an increasing number of businesses now looking to go global, this is one of the key steps they need to take to attract clients wherever they go.

Localization isn’t just about translating content to the local language. Some of the best localization campaigns as explained here by Smartling show how brands such as Netflix, Airbnb, and the WWF have all found interesting ways to appeal to people from different countries and cultures. On the other hand, a poor localization attempt can damage the brand’s credibility and might even unintentionally cause offense or force them into legal problems.

The importance of localization can also be seen in gambling sites like Sportingtech, which demonstrate how the process needs to be based on achieving regional functionality for the users. This type of platform that bring together numerous elements that the company can customize for their local market is ideal in iGaming, but it can’t be applied in every other industry.

How Can AI Help?

For the moment, it seems that we read something new and exciting about AI in the news every day, but little has been spoken yet about its ability to localize products and services on behalf of businesses. The starting point could be a fast and accurate translation that takes local dialects and tastes into account.

The software would need to have a deep understanding of the culture and trends in the target market, and this is where some form of human intervention would be needed. The company would need to let the AI system know which markets they want to enter and then give it access to the key information needed for it to start learning well.

Given the highly-publicized technical issues around AI, such as the errors spotted when Microsoft rolled out their latest AI-powered version of the Bing search engine, there is still a lack of trust in terms of letting this technology take over a full localization campaign.

Imagine receiving a huge amount of AI-generated content in a foreign language that’s meant to launch your company into a new country. Right now, there’s not enough evidence that we can rely on every single thing that they create without manual checks. Few companies will want to put their global reputation on this sort of content without at least having some form of human quality control.

Given the controversy over issues such as AI’s inability to draw realistic human hands, as detailed here in the BBC Science Focus magazine, it seems that we’ll need to wait before reaching the stage where AI can be trusted to carry out a full localization process. Yet, the technology could certainly be used soon as part of this, and it could help businesses to save time when entering new markets provided that they’re extremely careful about how it’s done.