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Vol. 37 No. 1 — Jan/Feb 2020

Language is the glue of immersive customer experiences, provided that it speaks to people’s hearts and minds, online and offline. So you have to consider the major areas driving the evolution of language intelligence internationally: text translation, video dubbing, product localization, and speech recognition. It is crucial to select the products and services that empower you to grow your business from a cost-effective and time-sensitive perspective.

REASON #1: GOING BEYOND WORDS

Language intelligence addresses all facets of language. Think about the words that your customers read or listen to. Language has always gone beyond words, and language intelligence makes all aspects apparent more holistically than ever in the digital age. End-to-end content effectiveness implies analyzing and implementing linguistic, cultural, and functional relevance. This means that you have to use the words, values, and functionality that create a personal dialogue between local customers and yourself.

It is a challenge to consider critical variances and dependencies in each local market, and it is a source of failure in content creation and product localization. Language intelligence provides you with holistic language coverage in text, audio, and video content in order to avoid costly mistakes or cultural insensitivities. It also enables you to select and work with the most appropriate resources for each task in the content value chain. Just consider one product or service that you want to deploy outside of your domestic market. Content must be designed and developed with international customers in mind from the outset. User experience architects and writers, storytellers, and globalization engineers are your best allies to make it ready for subsequent localization, specifically for fully functional and native content readiness. During the localization stage, linguists, terminologists, and language analysts fine-tune your content to local standards, conventions, and requirements. This applies to user interfaces, product descriptions, and branding campaigns—to name but a few examples in product management.

REASON #2: ALWAYS IMPROVING

Language intelligence is powered by technology and improved by intelligent automation. Not surprisingly, AI (in general) and machine learning (in particular) push language processing and management to new limits on an ongoing basis. Do you remember, a few years ago, when you used automated translation tools that did not seem to be better than automatic dictionaries generating word-by-word output? Today, contextual sensitivity and continuous multilingual enrichment have obviously increased accuracy and therefore usefulness of machine translation.

Translating and localizing incremental amounts of content without disruption and at scale are facilitated by neural machine translation (NMT) in many cases—facilitated, not replaced. You should not consider NMT to be a silver bullet for any type of content, deployed product, and target market. Due diligence and in-depth customer understanding are required to ensure that language processing and automation solutions remain in line with sensitivity, capacity, and scalability objectives. The right combination of machine and human intelligence is the sweet spot you should look for, because it determines how much automation can be leveraged without being counterproductive eventually. Intelligent automation is about getting this balance right.

For (very) creative marketing content, you have to make sure that all nuances and details are captured and reflected in the final draft that you plan to deliver to your local customers. More often than not, specialized linguists and language analysts can—based on their expertise and experience—edit, refine, and enhance the raw output you get from your solution. They enhance overall language intelligence, upgrading and differentiating your content and products. In other cases involving user-generated content from social listening, you may want to get the gist of it so that very little editing—or no editing at all—is in the scope of your project.

REASON #3: THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Language intelligence is experience-driven and data-driven. When it comes to offering and selling your products in local markets, you cannot do without experiential marketing. Delivering the most immersive and memorable customer experiences is the ultimate goal, and language intelligence enables you to reach it. Language effectiveness can make or break such experiences, which is why you must start with the local expected customer experiences. Instead of creating products or content from a company-centric standpoint, you have to build a solution that is articulated around what local customers really want, prefer, and need. In order to do so, you need hard facts supporting your creation, localization, and delivery efforts. You should map linguistic, cultural, and functional requirements with each and every phase of local customer journeys so that your content is synchronized with your customers’ typical experiences.

Language intelligence criteria and indicators should be nurtured with data and insights reflecting the actual impact that the language you use creates in the mind and memory of local customers. Speaking their language implies getting to know their habits, their ecosystems, and their issues. It boils down to understanding why, where, when, and how content resonates with them. You should leverage language intelligence to tell and sell your stories with words, references, and features that trigger positive customer actions and reactions.