The arrival of Google Gemini, Chat GTP, Claude and a host of other AI language models have been making steady waves in the translation industry. They promise enhanced quality, real-time communication and a list of multilingual capabilities that might even surprise you. But is translation with Gemini good enough for your business? Can it translate multilingual website pages accurately? Offer transcreation services? That’s what we’re about to find out.
Already have a translation project in mind?
Gemini by Google, previously known as BARD, was released on 6th December 2023, with subsequent updates since. It’s Google’s most advanced AI model, designed to process and integrate multiple types of data including text, images, audio, video and code. This multimodal functionality is what makes it a versatile tool for a range of uses, including translation. But when does it make sense to translate with Gemini, and when should you be trusting your website translations to translation agencies who incorporate human translation?
Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:
- How to use Gemini for website translations
- The key features of Gemini
- The advantages of translation with Gemini
- The limitations of translation with Gemini
How to use Gemini for website translations
Gemini comes in three sizes, each optimised for different levels of complexity and tasks.
1. Gemini Nano
Nano is suited to on-device translations such as mobile apps or small-scale websites. While it offers basic translation capabilities, it may not handle complex queries as effectively as larger models.
2. Gemini Pro
The Pro size will fulfil most business needs. This includes dynamic translation of website content and integration with various applications.
3. Gemini Ultra
If you’re an enterprise requiring a high level of performance, particularly for complex translations and high volumes of content, then Ultra should suit you. This size is
expected to outperform Pro in industry benchmarks which makes it ideal for businesses with more demanding translation needs.
To translate your company’s website pages for international markets, there are two routes you can take:
- Google Cloud Translation API with Gemini
Google Cloud has an API that includes Gemini as one of its translation models. The API allows you to translate from a broad spectrum of languages into another. You can use Google Cloud’s libraries to integrate the Translation API into your website’s backend.
- Translation Hub
Another, more comprehensive solution, is the Translation Hub from Google Cloud. It’s designed for large volumes of content translation and provides a workflow management system.
The key features of Gemini
A significant step in Google’s AI development, Gemini aims to enhance productivity, creativity and collaboration. Let’s get into the features.
Understanding and answering complex questions
- Gemini can analyse the context of queries, allowing it to handle fairly nuanced and multi-part questions with accuracy.
- It can reason and read comprehension, making it suitable for professional communication that requires detailed explanations.
Generating various creative text formats
- Content creation is a popular task for Gemini. It can generate articles, stories and marketing copy tailored to your desired style and tone.
- Familiar with writer’s block? Gemini can assist writers by suggesting prompts and drafting content—a handy tool for devising new concepts.
Conducting research and synthesising information
- Gemini accesses and processes data from a wide range of datasets including books and academic papers. This data is then presented in a clear concise manner, allowing you to retrieve relevant information quickly.
- It can also summarise lengthy texts and extract key insights while maintaining context, making it useful for quick overviews.
Translating languages
- In many cases, Gemini can deliver accurate and fluent translations, sometimes capturing idiomatic expressions and cultural nuances.
- It offers real-time translation suited to live interactions and communication in multilingual environments.
- With a customisable Translation Memory, you can input your brand’s preferred translations for specific terms.
The advantages of translation with Gemini
Now you know what Gemini can do, how can your business really benefit from using Gemini?
Quality translations
With Gemini’s ability to maintain the original meaning of a text, you can ensure your translated content is reasonably accurate and professional.
Real-time translation
As we saw earlier, Gemini translates in real-time, which can allow for quick communication during business meetings and customer service interactions, enhancing collaboration and responsiveness in a work environment.
Contextual understanding
A strength of Gemini lies in understanding the context of sentences and paragraphs, including some idiomatic expressions and cultural references.
Wide language support
Gemini supports over 100 languages, giving you the potential to translate and expand your reach into multiple markets.
Customisable translation memory
The ability to input preferred translations for specific terms and phrases ensures consistency and accuracy, which is particularly valuable if you work in an industry with specialised jargon.
The limitations of translation with Gemini
Straight-forward real-time use isn’t without its challenges, though. Where Gemini excels in speed, it can lack in accuracy, which is where the expertise of native human translators comes in. Curious about Gemini’s take on this, we put the question to Google’s AI model. Here’s what it had to say.
Us: “Gemini, can you undertake content localisation with the same accuracy as a human being?”
Gemini: “I can’t localise content with the same accuracy as a human being just yet, though I’m getting better!
Here’s why:
Content localisation goes beyond translation: It’s about adapting content for a specific culture, not just changing languages. This includes understanding humour, references, and even design elements that resonate with the target audience. In essence, It can be a valuable tool for initial translation and content adaptation, but human oversight is still crucial for high-quality, culturally-sensitive localisation.”
Well put, Gemini. Now let’s dive deeper into these limitations. Here are some you should consider.
- Industry-specific knowledge
Professional translators often specialise in specific fields, ensuring that they understand the nuances and terminology relevant to your content. This expertise is crucial for accurately conveying complex ideas and maintaining the integrity of your message. Without human translators in its process, Gemini can’t grasp the full extent of your industry knowledge.
- Quality assurance
Professional translation services typically offer a human review process involving multiple layers of quality assurance, like editing and proofreading. This helps catch errors, ensures consistency and refines the translation so that it meets your high standard of accuracy. While Gemini offers advanced translation capabilities, it can still produce inconsistencies that require human intervention to correct.
- Cultural nuance
Human translators are better equipped to understand cultural contexts and subtleties that can affect how a message is received. They can adapt translations to resonate with your local audiences, ensuring that your content is culturally appropriate and effective. Automated translations may miss these nuances, leading to potential misunderstandings.
- SEO translation
Any digital business needs SEO to flourish. But this is an area where Gemini falls short. While its advanced language capabilities can make it a handy tool for SEO professionals, to excel in SEO translation, you need the expertise of a dedicated agency to ensure your content is optimised for search engines.
- Transcreation services
Transcreation – the process of adapting marketing content to an international market without losing the original message – requires deep cultural understanding and creative writing skills. While Gemini can produce fluent translations, only a human can capture the creative and cultural nuances for high-quality transcreation.
Consider hybrid translation
Gemini is a powerful tool that’s narrowing the gap between machine and human translation. But as we assess its capabilities today and peer into the future of translation, it’s apparent that a combination of AI and human expertise is essential.
To avoid inconsistency and potential inaccuracies, especially with specialised content, human translators are needed to review and post-edit the output. The most effective method on the market today is a hybrid model, one that marries the speed of AI translation with the precision of human translators to ensure the highest quality and cultural appropriateness.
At Milega, we’ve crafted a model to do just that. Our H-AI-BRID method is a combination of the trustworthiness of native human translators with the speed of AI technology for translation localisation, SEO, transcreation and multilingual website content creation—with results to prove it.
With the H-AI-BRID method, your business can expect:
- 70% higher conversion rates compared to automated solutions
- 50% reduction in translation time
- 60% cheaper than traditional translation
