Collaborative work and Machine translation

Within an international company, employees, customers or suppliers must be able to communicate in their native language. But how can we guarantee everyone’s understanding without having to speak an intermediate language? Thanks to machine translation. It helps teams understand each other and collaborate on a day-to-day basis, saving you time. Find out how.

Misunderstanding a foreign language can affect your performance

Even with a very good level of English, translation remains a time-consuming task and the quality of the result is not always optimal. Misunderstandings due to language are a barrier to the fluidity of daily work (whether for writing email or translating technical documents).

Incomprehension of suppliers, problem of productivity and fluidity of exchanges, leakage of sensitive data (if using a free online tool)… The consequences of misunderstandings can have a strong impact on the internal activity of your company.

What is collaborative work about?

Internal communication

To collaborate effectively, all internal communication – that is, within the company, by and for its members – must be fully accessible. For example, information exchanged between marketing, sales, and IT teams on a joint project is a matter of internal communication.

It applies to all international subsidiaries and other cross-border teams, so messages must be understood by everyone.

To ensure good internal communication and collaborative work, you need to ensure that all your employees have access to the same level of information and training, regardless of the language they speak.

Train your employees

In each subsidiary, regardless of the language used, your employees must be able to access the same data and be trained in the same way.

So think of the Intranet translation that brings together all the processes, methods and knowledge bases of the company. Also consider translating support tickets.

External Communication

Communicating with people outside the company is also a collaborative task: any information exchanged with partners, suppliers and customers must be easily understandable.

The challenge of external communication in an international context is to provide all clients with the same level of quality of service, service and advice. And this, whatever their language. A real increase in productivity and efficiency for your customer service!

For example, a German after-sales service that covers the needs of European customers can use machine translation – which facilitates the processing of requests and offers a real human resources advantage.

What are the uses for machine translation?

Translate emails and attachments

In the context of professional life, email remains the most exchanged document. Automatically translating this type of content, as well as related documents, is like facilitating and fluidizing collaborative work, exchanges between collaborators and missions to accomplish.

With an integrated machine translation tool, you have two options:

translate the entire email automatically – via machine translation;
translate on demand, by clicking on the option or selecting the text to translate.

With the Translation API and Office apps available directly in SYSTRAN Translate Pro, your employees will be able to perform all their translations on your external or internal applications, including collaborative or customer service platforms:

emails in Outlook,
a cat in Teams,
a website in its browser,
support tickets in the customer service ticketing tool…

Why choose machine translation?

Wider language coverage

With 21 foreign languages used within companies¹, language diversity and comprehension difficulties are significant. With machine translation, you can instantly understand content in one language for all your employees: all languages and all branches are easily accessible.

Your teams’ time and translation costs are optimized

Using translation agencies requires a budget that can be substantial for subsidiaries, and ensuring translation in-house can be a considerable waste of time.

Thus, to increase team efficiency and reduce costs, the use of integrated and automatic tools makes it possible to combine all possibilities of optimization.

Instant access

For smooth and transparent use and significant productivity gains, you can integrate and link your translation solutions to the daily tools of employees (on the Office suite, Teams, Outlook…).

Data security is assured

Some data transmitted internally may be sensitive (strategic documents or personal information): 56% of translations are classified as confidential or strictly confidential². Their safety is therefore of paramount importance and regulated. However, 65% of these translations are done using free automated tools³.

Using a free machine translation tool, whose rules of use are not always clear, is taking the risk of having your sensitive data disseminated to everyone. They can be reused to improve translation models of free tools – used by other companies – or saved on servers.

Need an accessible, automatic and secure solution? Think about machine translation. By pooling all your questions and documents, you can streamline exchanges and increase productivity.

¹ Source: DGESCO-CCI France survey, 2014, Céreq-IREDU analysis / ² Source: Slator / ³ Source: CSA – Research

Collaborative work: Why use machine translation?