|
flevyblog
The Flevy Blog covers Business Strategies, Business Theories, & Business Stories.
|
Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Digital Transformation: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy (27-slide PowerPoint presentation). The rise of the machines is becoming an impending reality. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution is here. Most businesses are aware of this and see the tremendous potential of AI. This presentation defines AI and explains the 3 basic forms of AI: 1. Assisted Intelligence 2. [read more]
* * * *
A few years ago, the idea of handing your entire website over to a machine to translate would’ve made most marketing teams nervous. Now it’s basically the default. Plenty of businesses want to translate their website using AI instead of waiting weeks for an agency quote, and honestly, for most of the content on a typical site, that shift makes sense. The real question is not whether AI can do it. It can. The real challenge is making it quite natural. 
That question is more significant than ever, since there are more serious consequences involved. A poor translation isn’t just unappealing; it can quietly tell the customer,
This brand doesn’t seem to care about its customers. CSA’s own research revealed that something like 75% of consumers will prefer to purchase from a website written in their own language.
For the bulk of a website, product descriptions, blog posts, nav menus, footers, modern AI translation is fast, consistent, and honestly pretty good.
AI is powerful at scale, but it’s not perfect, and it’s when brands lie about that, when they lie about this, that awkward, sometimes embarrassing copy lives on their website.
Translation that’s not easy to search for or that doesn’t look nice is like a page that doesn’t exist. Many AI translation tools involve swapping out text within the visitor’s browser, but there is no actual crawling done, so it appears to be accurate to a human, but not to Google.
Before picking anything, get specific about what you’re solving. Speed to launch is one thing, but what happens six months from now when the site’s still changing weekly is a different question entirely.
A site that updates sometimes can get away with a one-time translation pass. A site publishing content frequently needs something that catches new or edited pages automatically and only translates what actually changed, not the whole site over and over on every sync.
If you need only to be readable to a specific audience or to an internal team, then a “lightweight” snippet which translates in the browser is just fine. Where organic traffic is the priority in new markets, it’s important to have translated pages living at real, crawlable URLs, with correct hreflang and translated metadata, rather than simply browser-side changes on the pages.
Not every option is solving the same problem, and knowing the rough categories saves a lot of back-and-forth during evaluation.
One line of code; translations render live; no rebuild or DNS changes required. Quick to launch, and a solid fit for staging sites or internal tools that just need to be readable.
The AI draft goes live fast, then real reviewers check it against the real page layout before a market fully launches. But for brands that would like to get it fast without sending out something that reads like it was never proofread.
It’s normal to feel a little bit afraid of touching an active site. No one wants to ruin pages that work.
Don’t sign anything without checking out your actual pages translated, not a demo. The vast majority of good tools allow you to enter your own URL and get a real-time preview of your website before you sign up for a thing.
If ranking in new markets is the whole point, don’t just take a vendor’s word for it.
AI has genuinely changed what’s realistic here. A project that used to take months and a real budget can now go live in days, and for most of a website’s content, the quality holds up fine. But just because AI can do something doesn’t mean it should do everything on its own.
The ones who are seeing the greatest impact allow AI to deal with the volume, repetitive pages, constant updates, and save the human eye for the pages that matter most: pricing, legal, homepage, the first impression page.
It’s truly an investment either way, so it’s better to get it right than to send a piece that appears fast but is soon broken on the first day someone reads it closely in its native language.
You can download in-depth presentations on Artificial Intelligence and 100s of management topics from the FlevyPro Library. FlevyPro is trusted and utilized by 1000s of management consultants and corporate executives.
For even more best practices available on Flevy, have a look at our top 100 lists:
These best practices are of the same as those leveraged by top-tier management consulting firms, like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and Accenture. Improve the growth and efficiency of your organization by utilizing these best practice frameworks, templates, and tools. Most were developed by seasoned executives and consultants with over 20+ years of experience.
