HubSpot’s Localization Goals
HubSpot aims to provide non-English user interactions that match the quality of its English ones across all customer touchpoints with its software and content, regardless of language preference. This is essential to HubSpot's international growth strategy, enabling delightful experiences for its customers in all markets and adding value to their businesses.
Localization plays a crucial role in achieving this goal, and HubSpot's localization team is dedicated to realizing these ambitions. The team collaborates with stakeholders from every organization and department within the company in various capacities. This ranges from offering globalization consulting to managing full-scale programs, including change, risk, and systems management.
The Benefits of Generative AI
HubSpot has been leveraging machine translation (MT) technology for a long time and is continually seeking opportunities to enhance MT operations. This includes expanding the portfolio of providers and improving existing MT processes. HubSpot stays up-to-date with the latest technological developments in the industry and actively explores hands-on applications.
While the quality of neural MT continues to improve, limitations remain when it comes to adapting its output to an organization’s preferred vocabulary and style. While some MT services can now leverage glossaries and existing translations, this remains an offline step that adds complexity to the process. If the MT output does not adhere to the correct terminology, that in turn generates tedious, manual search-and-replace tasks and even more work in highly inflected languages.
Generative AI’s ability for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) means it can incorporate a customer’s terminology and produce correct phrasing without needing to retrain entire models or upload files in a separate step. This helps align its output with the vocabulary, style, and tone of voice of translations created by HubSpot’s linguists and external partners.
Why memoQ AGT?
HubSpot started evaluating memoQ AGT in December 2023, driven by a desire to explore advanced AI features and enhance machine translation capabilities. The primary motivation was to assess how memoQ AGT could improve the accuracy and contextual relevance of translations.
Amidst a global AI expansion, there is significant interest in using AI to enhance existing systems and processes, and memoQ AGT appeared to be a perfect fit for this purpose.
Positive Impact from Day One
HubSpot had very promising experiences with memoQ AGT right from the beginning. Since it is natively integrated with memoQ, it plugs easily into existing workflows and processes.
Dierk Runne, Senior Manager, Product Localization & Systems at HubSpot Germany GmbH explains:
'It was very noticeable that the ability of memoQ AGT to leverage context-specific information when generating translations has significantly enhanced translation accuracy and quality, well surpassing the capabilities of some traditional machine translation tools.'
Challenges Solved by memoQ AGT
memoQ AGT enables HubSpot to address a variety of localization challenges. It allows HubSpot to scale localization efforts, broaden language coverage, and effectively handle diverse localization use cases. Leveraging context-specific information from HubSpot's linguistic resources also enhances translation accuracy and relevance.
HubSpot’s Stake on Generative AI
Mr. Runne continues:
'I believe that generative AI technology has the potential to significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of localization teams. By leveraging contextual information, generative AI can enable more accurate and contextually relevant translations, reducing the need for manual intervention and accelerating the localization process.
It also has the potential to open up entirely new use cases for machine translation processing, and we might see developments similar to the introduction of neural machine translation where companies started to provide translations for previously untranslated content. With generative AI, we could see more integration into domains and types of content that were previously reserved for human translation and/or review.
Generative AI has the potential to significantly enhance value when utilized effectively by localization teams and seamlessly integrated into existing workflows and systems. With thoughtful planning and responsible use, this technology can be a powerful tool that drives success and innovation. Simply throwing content into an LLM for translation is not going to cut it.
I would also like to make the case for a transparent use of the technology. Audiences are getting more and more accustomed to interacting with machine-translated content and going forward, the same will happen for content created with generative AI. However, one thing is unlikely to ever change: Audiences will never appreciate it when companies are trying to hide the fact that they use technologies like machine translation and generative AI.'
Integrating memoQ AGT Into Current Processes
HubSpot's integration of memoQ AGT as a native feature within the memoQ environment was a straightforward process. However, current limitations prevent the comprehensive implementation of memoQ AGT across their tech stack and localization processes. At the time of writing, the feature is restricted to offline projects, limiting its use to individual memoQ users working on their own project copies. Nevertheless, memoQ AGT will work with online projects in the next release of memoQ. Dierk Runne, Senior Manager, Product Localization & Systems at HubSpot Germany GmbH shares:
“I am excited about the potential of memoQ AGT and generative AI technology generally in the localization space. memoQ is demonstrating its ability to stay at the forefront of technological developments, and I look forward to exploring the full range of capabilities of AGT as the feature matures.”
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