Where AI Falls Down – Why Multilingual Content Creation Still Needs The Human Touch

While AI has come on in leaps and bounds and CAT tools are very valuable to translators and transcreators, they are no match for the leads that can be produced from investing in original content written by native speakers. The aim is not just to have content in another language. The aim is to achieve e-commerce objectives, and to have your content indexed in all search engines globally, not just Google. A recent study showed that while AI-created content and human-created content could be equally easy to understand, the human-created content was better at persuading readers to go further in the buying journey. Having content optimised for a particular language audience will mean you have more people around the world reach your projects, and those browsers will seamlessly become buyers. Even with all the developments in AI translation software and CAT tools, here’s a rundown as to why real-life writers are still essential

Original content optimised for search engines

Google’s new algorithm

In late 2019, Google released a new algorithm: BERT. The word on BERT is that it will not reward websites which are merely stuffed with keywords. In order for your website to be SEO-optimised and sent up the ranks, the content itself needs to be high quality. BERT will even penalise websites where grammar is not to a high standard. The only way to guarantee high quality grammar, and therefore to guarantee you appear on search engines, is with native speakers working on original content creation.

Your target audience, region by region

If you’re a travel company, some of your audience will search for “eco-friendly journeys” and some for “luxury holidays”. You want to make sure that you have content for both topics, so that a wider audience base reaches you. However, research shows that target audiences’ priorities differ from region to region. You may want to reach French-speakers, but your target audience in Canada may have different priorities to your audience in Belgium. Writers can do content creation within specific parameters in a way AI cannot possibly.

Quality content converting your target audience

Filling the gap in the market

What’s the need for multilingual content at all? Why the expense? Surely most people reaching your website can speak English? Think again. Consider these statistics:

• Only 20% of the world speaks English.
• Only 5% of the world considers English their mother tongue, and yet…
• 55% of all online content is in English.

That doesn’t seem to add up. This is particularly unbalanced when you consider that a great amount of the content which is not in English was still originally created in English and simply translated into other languages. Conclusion? There is a massive gap in the market for content creation specifically attracting non-English speakers.

Express yourself

Even if you have AI translation tools for some element of the content creation, you will still need the human touch for fine-tuning at the end:

• editing out translation errors and making the text feel fluent
• correcting and standardising, such as changing units of measurement for the target audience.
• adding correct idioms for the language
• making jokes and humour in the text work
• ensuring that the text expresses the emotional meaning, not just the literal meaning of the words.

If the writer had had the content creation task from the beginning, perhaps the jokes could flow better from the off, and the writer wouldn’t have to spend time trying to find matching idioms in different languages.

The undeniable benefits of commissioning writers

Original content creation for different languages will drive leads like nothing else. Potential customers who can access your website in their mother tongue are more likely to feel like your services are for them, and that they personally are valued by your company, and this will convert into sales. In contrast, translation errors – or even content that just sounds like a translation – can lose you business. It alienates your audience and misrepresents your company. So, while paying for writers can feel like an expense, in the long run it is cheaper and more efficient to have native speakers doing content creation for you from scratch. Get in touch with greatcontent today to commission content in 30+ languages and convert your target audience globally.

Text: The Fox
Image: Sara Kurfeß on unsplash.com