Writing for the World: Using AI to Help Publish on a Global Scale

Image credit: Ken Wong, digital design director

Writing and publishing global content can be one of the biggest challenges organisations face, with many global firms typically producing at least one article per day, in several different languages. Partner, and global technology lead, James McCobb details how he is helping small teams publish content on a global scale with the help of AI.

Engaging with employees can be difficult for organisations with a large workforce based in different countries, with different time zones, and languages. But, if the last couple of years has taught us anything it’s that to engage with your employees effectively online tools are essential. They allow us to cross physical boundaries and reach people from every corner of the world. 

For large global organisations communicating with a dispersed workforce across an Intranet can come with its own issues, including:

• Communicating in as many as 20-30 different languages.
• Creating engaging content that translates well into each language.
• Smaller communications teams are often stretched on resource, and time. 

The obvious response to these issues is to outsource translation services, however this can take time and is expensive. Until now it has been the cost of translation either in headcount or external services that has kept firms from realising the potential of their investments. This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes into play. AI has the unique ability to translate any language at a point of typing, into multiple languages and then publish each of those languages. It enables small internal communications teams to simply write something once in one language but speak to the whole world. It’s something we are already doing for our clients. 

Our real-time translation feature is one of the first concept to production tools created by our in-house skunk works*. In this case, we applied it to our own website first. Trialling and testing resources like Amazon, Microsoft Cognitive Services and Azure Text Translator API we found the Microsoft tool to be the best and most effective translation tool for our needs. 

A client then came to us with this very problem, they needed to speak to the world. We took our learnings from our own website creating a robust production version with our technical partner Mitra Innovation, then rapidly deployed the production version into the client’s environment with five different languages. Including French, Italian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and Japanese. The feedback was that not only did this service enable a small team to publish globally but the technology was so sophisticated translations needed very little editing if at all. The only note of caution is that this technology requires robust and managed infrastructure to enable the technology to work seamlessly. By applying AI to the global communication issue, you can keep costs down, and start talking to the world with the smallest team possible. So, if you want to find out more about applying AI to your business problem, get in touch.

*In house rapid technical development and prototyping team.