Thanks to the automation of processes, companies have become more efficient and productive. With more time on their hands, they can focus on other tasks that require major attention, like building trust with customers, generating sales, and increasing brand awareness. Machine translation post-editing is a more cost-effective solution that allows you to save time. But is it a viable option for your marketing copy?

Automation, however, has not been the only measure taken by companies to cut costs and save time. With the NMT development (neural machine translation), the quality of machine-translated texts has significantly improved, however, a human translator is still required to amend de MT output, improve fluency and fix major issues that the machine is not able to detect.

Is this practice viable for marketing translation?

Let’s take a look at this approach and find out whether it’s a viable option for your business.

Overview: What’s Machine Translation Post-Editing?

MTPE is the acronym for Machine Translation Post Editing, and it’s the process of editing a text after an MT engine translated it. As mentioned before, this process requires a human translator who carefully reviews the output and make style and linguistic changes, when required.

This option has several advantages: it saves you time, it’s more cost-effective, and it’s great for large volumes of texts, particularly when they have a lot of repetitions.

However, MTPE has its weaknesses and is not apt to any type of text.

Machine Translation Post-Editing and Marketing: A Winning Combination?

Let’s now focus on the use of MTPE and marketing translation: could it be effective when translating your marketing materials?

Marketing copy has one characteristic that differentiates it from any other type of text: it encapsulates your brand essence.

Marketing copy is targeted, it has a specific tone of voice, style, and goal. Unlike, for example, technical texts that are rather functional, marketing texts instill emotions.

Think of a slogan or a pitch for a Google ad: these types of texts often require rewriting and adaptation so to reflect the intent. Moreover, keep into account the editing needed to meet the character limit requirement.

A pun or a joke won’t necessarily work in the target language, so the translator has to find a solution to maintain the original intention.

Marketing translation requires hours of work, the goal is to make the text read local. Before actually working on the text, the translator will need to do a research on your brand to be able to reflect the same TOV (tone of voice) in the translated version.

MTPE will be useless in this case. Although the MT output might be of quality, it would require a lot of amendments if you want the result to be effective.

In other words, it wouldn’t be cost-effective for your business. You might save money at the beginning; but then you’ll have to hire a copywriter to turn the text into a copy that sells.

By hiring a marketing translator, you pay a little more, but you get a copy that converts and gets you new clients.