Writing content with machine translation in mind

Language I/O’s mission is to help monolingual customer support teams seamlessly communicate with their customers in over 150 languages over any channel, including chat, email, knowledge base articles, and social messaging. To achieve this, Language I/O provides unique Machine Translation (MT) technology that gets you and your teams up and running quickly with accurate and secure translations.

One of the key factors to ensure the quality of Machine Translation is the quality of the source content. The purpose of this article is to walk you through some basic concepts to remember when as an agent, you write to your end customers via chat or mail, so that you can make the most out of Language I/O. Indeed, as part of a customer support team that uses a multilingual platform, you must always keep in mind that you are writing content for an end customer that does not speak the same language as you.

Summary

• Tip 1 - Avoid ambiguity
• Tip 2 - Recycle whenever possible
• Tip 3 - Keep it simple
• Tip 4 - Be culturally aware
• Tip 5 - Watch out for common mistakes
• Tip 6 - Be mindful of how you use emojis

Tip 1 - Avoid ambiguity

Avoid using words that can have multiple meanings in different contexts

This may be tricky at first, but this approach can go a long way in making a message more unequivocal. 

For example, "opening" can have very different meanings depending on the context. If you use it within an HR domain, use the more explicit expression "job opening".

Use complete sentences

Always write full sentences to avoid potential mistranslations.

For example, for MT engines, "A year free" can mean "an available year" in many languages, and not "a year for free":

Repeat nouns instead of using pronouns when possible

Any pronoun (such as I, me, he, she, it, they, us, we, our, etc.) can be ambiguous depending on how the sentence is constructed. To clear up any ambiguity, just replace the pronoun with a noun.

For example, in the scenario below, the pronoun "he" is ambiguous because you do not know who is getting back to you: this could refer to either Mark or Andrew. Replacing "he" with the name of the person who carries out the action removes the ambiguity:

Use articles (a, an, the) to help MT engines differentiate between verbs and nouns

In the example blow, the engine mistranslated "skip" as "to jump", but it translated "the skip" correctly as "the container", thanks to the use of the definite article "the":

Use terminology consistently

For example, do not refer to "file types" and "file formats" in the same communication.

Avoid slang as much as possible

Do not use words such as: "dude", "mate", "buddy", "yeah", etc.

Avoid unnecessary abbreviations or acronyms

Do not use abbreviations or acronyms, unless you added a list of these expressions to the glossaries.

Make sure that key elements remain untranslated

(See also Tip 5 below)

In some cases, you may find that you need key elements of a message to be left untranslated. When this happens, Language I/O can configure this option. Commonly protected elements can include:

• Names and surnames of people
  • This is especially relevant when the name is also a common noun, such as Heather, Rose, Willow, etc.
• Names of companies, products, features or services
  • The best way to manage this is to add the list of relevant terms to the Glossary.
• Email addresses
• Postal addresses
• URLs

For example, if the email address below is not protected, the word "recruit" in the address gets automatically translated into Spanish. With custom delimiters, the email address is preserved:

Avoid idioms

Idioms typically do not translate well into other languages and cultures. It is best to avoid them, and replace them with easy-to-understand sentences.

Examples of common idiomatic sentences may include:

• be on the same page
• be under the weather
• ring a bell
• compare apples to apples
• compare apples to oranges
• call a spade a spade
• call it a day

Tip 2 - Recycle whenever possible

• Use templates for your content whenever possible.
• Make sure that your content:
  • takes into account the multilingual support environment, and
  • follows the guidelines presented in this document.

Tip 3 - Keep it simple

One sentence per concept or idea

Always try to keep a simple sentence structure, and avoid long sentences. If necessary, split a sentence into smaller sentences instead of using complex subordinate clauses.

Use active voice over passive voice

End users and MT engines understand active voice better:

Do not mix different languages in communications

Mixing languages can result in unexpected outputs from the MT engine.

For example, in the scenario below, the English-speaking agent used the Italian word "Ciao" in a Spanish chat. Unfortunately, the MT engine mistranslated it as "Cow" in Spanish:

Tip 4 - Be culturally aware

Be aware of the appropriate greeting for the culture

In some cultures, it is more appropriate to greet the customer using their surname rather than first name.

For example:

• In Japan, customers are usually greeted using the surname followed by the suffix "-san" (meaning "dear" or "honorable"). For example, "Yamamoto-san" instead of "Hi, Etsuko".

• In Hungary, customers usually prefer to be greeted more formally, using their surname rather than first name.

Be mindful of your audience

Avoid cultural or local references that may be alien to your end users. For example, wishing an Egyptian customer "Happy Thanksgiving!" is not appropriate.

Tip 5 - Watch out for common mistakes

Common mistakes are typically errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, etc. Always do a quick automated spelling and grammar check, and a read-through before sending your messages.

MT engines occasionally struggle with spelling mistakes, typos, grammatical and punctuation mistakes. Proofreading your messages can make the rest of the interaction smoother, and also prevent unexpected or potentially embarrassing outcomes.

Example: capitalization

• MT engines can be very sensitive to capitalization.
• Make sure that you use the right capitalization, especially if you deal with names of services or packages that can also be regular words.

Suppose that you work with a package called "Now" or "NOW". This makes it tricky for MT engines to distinguish between "Now" the subscription package and "now" the adverb. In this case, you must always make sure the package name is capitalized correctly.

Tip 6 - Be mindful of how you use emojis

Currently Language I/O only support emojis when the message is in plain text. There is no emoji support if the text is HTML. Do not use or leave emojis in HTML source texts as this could lead to corrupted characters or formatting errors.
As a rule of thumb, environments that do support emojis are Chats & Messaging (no HTML). Environments that do not support emojis are Case/Tickets and Guide/Articles (HTML).