Maximising Global Marketing Impact: AI and Human Collaboration for Translation Efficiency

Cutting-edge advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are revolutionising translation, offering unprecedented time and cost efficiencies for brands expanding into new markets. To achieve market relevance, foster brand loyalty, and drive engagement across multiple platforms, brands’ marketing and advertising content must resonate deeply with diverse audiences. Achieving this amidst varying languages, cultures, and constrained budgets demands innovative language solutions that utilise AI and ML.

What’s often missing, however, is an integrated strategy blending technology with people and human emotion, utilised within a well-defined process. This blended approach delivers content that resounds across regions and borders—something AI translation alone cannot deliver.

How AI Translation Fits Within a Localization Strategy

AI integrates seamlessly into the marketer’s localization strategy by enhancing content adaptation’s efficiency, scalability, and accuracy across diverse markets. AI-powered tools like Neural Machine Translation (NMT) facilitate the rapid translation of marketing materials, such as advertisements, social media posts, and website content, while maintaining a high level of accuracy and contextual relevance. This allows marketing teams to quickly adapt and deploy campaigns across multiple languages, ensuring their messages reach global audiences simultaneously. The ability of NMT to learn from vast datasets means it can handle complex language nuances, which is crucial for marketing content relying heavily on emotional and cultural resonance.

AI supports the marketing localization strategy by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. For instance, AI can manage translation memories and glossaries, ensuring consistency in terminology and style across different languages and regions. This is particularly important for maintaining brand voice and messaging coherence. AI-driven tools also offer real-time collaboration features, enabling marketing teams to work together seamlessly, regardless of geographic location. By integrating AI into the localization process, teams can focus more on creative and strategic tasks, such as tailoring content to specific cultural contexts and crafting emotionally engaging narratives. This blended approach of AI and human expertise not only improves the quality of localised content but also accelerates the overall marketing efforts, allowing brands to penetrate new markets swiftly and effectively.

Bridging Technology and Emotion

The true power of AI in global marketing lies in its ability to enhance the human touch and effort while enabling the transformation of automated and AI translations into emotionally resonant content at scale. While AI can handle the heavy lifting of translating large volumes of text quickly, it is the human expertise that ensures the translated content captures the cultural and emotional nuances to resonate with local audiences. This integration between AI technology and the human touch of emotion is what makes AI-enhanced transcreation so powerful.

Three Tiers of Language Services

Localization experts can identify when and how to activate the correct tier of service, supported by the appropriate technology and people for a specific workstream or asset. There are three tiers to consider when developing a localization strategy. Those are:

• Tier 1: Human Transcreation: Human transcreation of a brand’s most creative assets by in-market copywriters ensures cultural relevance and emotional resonance. Transcreation involves reimagining the core idea to achieve maximum resonance and appear natural in a specific market by blending copywriting with translation, linguistics, and anthropology. For example, the classic Nike slogan “Just Do It” must be transcreated differently for every market and language to maintain its impact.
• Tier 2: Augmented Translation: Augmented Translation, which combines Neural Machine Translation with human expertise, utilises “translation memories” and real-time collaboration tools to enhance translation quality and speed. This blend allows translators to focus on adapting new material, avoiding repetitive translation, and decreasing cycle time. Additionally, brands can store ultra-creative campaign headlines and taglines within a glossary to ensure consistency across transcreation and translation workstreams.
• Tier 3: AI Translation with Real-Time Tools: Real-time translation and collaboration tools, powered by AI, including Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Generative AI, enable immediate translations with optional human post-editing, ensuring quick and accurate localization of high-volume content. Not all assets require the same level of human touch; some may benefit from a fully automated AI translation solution. This approach can provide considerable cost savings and, when paired with a brand’s translation memory, can deliver impressive results. Brand-dedicated linguists can support human post-editing to further enhance the quality of AI translations, ensuring the final output resonates culturally and emotionally with target audiences.

For Best Results, Start Early

Prioritising localization at the project’s origination stage is a crucial strategy especially when implementing AI ensures successful adaptation and minimised rework. By integrating localization teams early in campaign development, brands can create primary assets that require less rework when translating and transcreating. This upstream localization includes everything from consultation on copy to vetting the asset’s design, including images, fonts, and spacing. This ensures text expansion and contraction across languages is accommodated, resulting in better primary assets that increase the opportunity for automation and faster localization.

Leverage Technology Throughout the Process

AI translation achieves optimal results when integrated within a comprehensive tech stack that streamlines and enhances the entire creative production process. Tag’s Di Translate, a portal within the end-to-end marketing execution platform Digital Interact (Di), acts as a brand’s gateway to more than 120 languages and a range of AI and human solutions, including a network of more than 4,000 in-market linguists.

Case Study

Before partnering with Tag for language services, an established tele-dentistry company had used AI translation exclusively. Tag then implemented the three-tiered model, creating a foundational glossary for the brand. This included:

• Transcreating ultra-creative assets like taglines and television commercials.
• Automating lower-risk assets like print, social media, and email.
• Providing cultural consultation for new creative to improve the potential for future localization.

By leveraging advanced technologies like NMT, this approach improved translation quality, reduced language spending by up to 58%, and accelerated approval times by 35%. According to SDC’s VP of Creative, the technology’s language memory “kind of feels like magic.”

Looking Ahead: Future Trends

Integrating localization within a tech-enabled creative production workflow drives significant efficiencies, enhancing quality, minimising duplication, and reducing costs through strategic automation. Looking ahead, trends like AI-powered voice translation, immersive AR/VR localization experiences, and predictive analytics for content adaptation will shape the future of global marketing, making or breaking brands’ campaigns.

Tag works with brands to create and deliver impactful content at speed and scale. From creative production and activation to strategic sourcing and delivery analytics, we transcend digital and physical touchpoints to allow brand content and concepts to travel globally and connect locally through flexible, tech-enabled solutions.

Want to know more about Tag’s Language Services through its Marketing Centers of Excellence? We’re always on! Send us a line here.