Photo: the founders of TranslateWise, from left Sandra Roosna, Hans Niinemäe and Nazari Goudin.

People using Google Translate can now experience better machine translation. TranslateWise which won the investment from Ajujaht supporter EstBAN last year, introduced a better translation technology that everyone can try for free.

We talked to Sandra Roosna, the founder of TranslateWise, and asked her how to translate better and faster. P.S. This article is machine-translated via TranslateWise from the article in Estonian, it has not been edited in any way.

Can machine translation even compete with the exceptional quality of human translation?

I would not undervalue the power of artificial intelligence! TranslateWise technology often offers equivalent quality to the human translators’ service. We believe it’s critical to examine algorithms and rules behind the leading machine translation engines. In other words, TranslateWise makes it possible to create content, which machines translate fluently. I see how it surprises many skeptics.

Where is the TranslateWise platform used the most?

Currently, we offer our technology only for desktops, although we’ll make it mobile-friendly in the future. TranslateWise supports 140 languages. For example, active users include marketers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, brokers, and journalists, making sense because TranslateWise is best for translating emails, news, blogs, product descriptions and terms.

How much do you charge for using the translation platform? I understand that you can try for free, but you can’t try indefinitely.

Everyone can translate up to 3,600 words for free in TranslateWise. Monthly fee for unlimited translation is € 9.98 per month. You’ll get just one A4 page from a translation agency for this price. And it’s possible that human translator has used TranslateWise and edited only a few words.

What makes it so different from Google Translate?

Our users confirm that TranslateWise is easy to use and so much better compared to Google Translate. Also, it keeps the style and links within the text, enables to share translations with the team, edit together simultaneously and saves everything automatically. All this saves people 50-70% of the time when translating content.

Our team contains real technology fanatics, and we are fast in product development (not going to explain this in detail because the readers get tired and rivals get thoughts – SR). The new features we add to TranslateWise do not take several months or years, as for example, in large corps.

What suggestions do you give to content creators to avoid disappointment in machine translation?

Write shorter sentences, max 20 words. Also, avoid artistic phrases when writing content to be translated. Machines and professional translators struggle equally when created content that is difficult to read, understand and follow. Secondly, machine translation works well if the context is consistent throughout the article. If the writer jumps from one topic to another and uses illustrative expressions with little to do with the core topic, the machine loses contextual consistency.

I recommend following the golden rule: “One paragraph, one message”. When creating marketing content, please avoid metaphors because their meaning is too different across languages Finally, do test translation within the pair of languages you can validate. If needed, correct the source and when machine translation is great, choose more languages.

For all language pairs (there are over 3000 pairs!), English is the central language. Therefore, our platform is also 100% in English and we assume that the user understands it. If you want to translate the product description from Estonian into Japanese, first select English and validate the translation! Once you validate that the machine understands the content correctly, you can add as many languages as you need.

What are your plans for the future? After all, the technology platform never gets “ready.”

Our plans are huge. Currently, we are testing an innovative multilingual chat. It feels like a traditional Messenger-type solution to the website visitor. On the other side, it gives the agent superpower to reply in different languages while writing in the mother language. We implement automatic translation in both directions when it’s needed. The first e-shops are testing this solution. We invite others to join this exciting pilot project too! Find more information on the web and social media; it shouldn’t be difficult to find us.