If you’ve been keeping up with technology trends over the past few months, you've likely seen the recent explosion of AI technology and innovation.

Since as far back as 1968 with the release of the cult classic, "2001: The Space Odyssey," we've always heard that AI would be the next BIG thing.                                                                       
We’ve seen it in our movies, from Iron Man to Terminator, and we know that social media uses some kind of AI algorithm to create our feeds and push content. The Alexa in your house or Siri on your phone also uses AI to carry out all sorts of daily tasks.

But now, artificial intelligence has come to the masses, and it's making waves in every industry. While machine-powered tools have been around for years, the launch of the ChatGPT model in November 2022 put AI into the hands of everyday people.

And we're not saying that just to sound exciting.

The social media giant Facebook took four and half years to reach 100 million users. It took ChatGPT just under two months.

The age of AI is well and truly here, and the demand and usage of the technology are skyrocketing to the stratosphere. But let's stay grounded for just a moment.

 

Is the technology good?

Whether you've played with the tools yourself or you've been keeping up with the trends, you'll have heard that AI can be incredible at some tasks but somewhat terrible at others.

As a business looking to use technology to grow, scale, and make money, should you be using AI tools in your daily workflow? Can you trust it to get work done efficiently and to a high standard?

Could AI translation tools unlock the opportunity for your business to go global via machine-generated, marketing translation?

That's what we're talking about today as we delve into the current state of AI tools in marketing. We’ll discuss their effectiveness in content creation and marketing translation, and provide insight into any potential future developments. 

 

Are AI Tools Good Enough for Marketing?

AI has already revolutionised several aspects of marketing, including analytics, personalisation, and automation. Just look at automatic chatbots.

We see them everywhere these days. Messaging bots that allow you to ask questions and receive instant answers, book appointments, and do numerous simple tasks, but in your own time without having to connect with someone.

This technology is so popular that over 80% of marketers use chatbots within their strategies, and over 85% of all customer service interactions now occur through them.

So, what about when it comes to content creation?

The truth is AI is fairly good, but it is still somewhat limited.

 

ChatGPT For Example

Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool.

We won't go too into the details, but it's basically a technology that has read a substantial amount of internet content (about a billion unique websites). From this information, it predicts whatever the next word should be in each sentence it writes, regarding the prompt it was fed.

If we were to run ChatGPT now and write "finish this sentence: the quick brown", it comes back with the most obvious answer.

"The quick brown fox jumps over the fence." 

Now, I might be trying to write, "The quick brown cat sits on the mat," but the chances that that's written on the internet anywhere are pretty slim, so ChatGPT simply chooses not to write it.

In this way, the AI works by predicting each and every word it writes based on a billion websites' worth of content, and this is why the technology feels limited.

Countless people are talking at the moment about how AI-generated content is bland, boring, and misses that human touch, and that's because, quite simply, it does lack that touch.

All this technology is doing is predicting words based on what is already written, so it's not adding anything new to what's being said. 

In fact, it's even the case that models like GPT-3 and 4 even make up facts and figures for the content because it's not connected to the internet in real-time (it was only trained on data up to 2021). 

Even if it was connected to the real-time internet, how would you know the AI is pulling the correct data? 

If we write a blog post saying there are only three asthmatic people in the UK, that would be on the internet projected as fact. We use this example as a joke, but AI can't tell the difference.

Thus, AI has limitations when creating original, high-quality content. But it's not impossible to overcome some of the challenges to get the tech to produce first drafts, or smaller pieces of content (social media posts, brochures, or emails). 

 

AI in Marketing Translation: Challenges and Limitations

Let's return to our original idea - using AI technology to take a business to the international market and create global marketing campaigns. 

You might be unable to generate original content that works immediately in an international market, just like you couldn't always generate such content in your own language. 

However, from our own research and experiments, using AI technology to write social media posts and short-form content seems to be okay. 

Longer-form blog posts and articles weren't necessarily bad but did seem to require full human editing and rewriting to actually make the content unique, fluid, and exciting to read.

But what marketing translation?

Surely translating a word into another language is completely factual and can't go wrong.

It's just swapping words, right? Couldn't you just use Google Translate?

Well, not exactly.

When it comes to marketing translation, the stakes are high. 

Not only must the marketing translation be accurate, but it also needs to consider cultural nuances, regional expressions, and local norms. 

AI may not understand the target audience, and instead, just predict the words that would go next in a sentence. Of course, with a detailed informational brief, machine-powered tools may be able to understand the desired audience and region. 

Just like Google Translate, AI translation software doesn't read or understand the marketing content. It's just a translation tool that takes the words in your local language and swaps them for words in other languages of your choice.

This is where the concept of 'transcreation' comes in – the process of adapting a message from one language to another while preserving its intent, tone, and context.

AI translation tools have made significant strides in recent years, but they still struggle to match the subtlety and finesse of human translators. Cultural context, idiomatic expressions, and regional variations are often lost in machine translation, leading to awkward, confusing, or even offensive marketing messages.

KFC's entrance into the Chinese market is a famous example of a marketing translation failure in international marketing. 

Their slogan, "finger-licking good," was translated into Chinese as "eat your fingers off", which not only lost its intended meaning but also created a sense of discomfort among potential customers.

This happened several years ago and was a marketing translation that certainly grants a lot of laughs now, but it wasn't exactly ideal at the time.

And there are multiple examples of this being the case;

  • The IKEA "Fartfull workbench" means "full speed" in Swedish but in English…
  • The Coors "Turn it Loose" slogan translates into Spanish to "Suffer from Diarrhoea."
  • The American Dairy Association in Spanish means "Are you lactating?"

As you can see, these are all slight errors that make a big difference, and when you scale this up to full blog posts, marketing materials, or an entire website's worth of content, these aren't mistakes you can afford to make.

The trick is to use the transcreation process to translate your text and marketing copy in a way that keeps the message, tone, and style of the content the same in your new target language, and that requires a lot more work than just swapping the words around.

Work that a neural machine translation or machine translation cloud service just can't grasp currently. 

Sure, there's absolutely no doubt that AI can speed up the process (which we'll get into shortly), but for now, there'll always be a necessary human element to make sure everything runs smoothly. 

To be clear, we aren't against machine translation (in fact, we use it) – but for international marketing, we don't think AI tools are enough. 

 

The Future of AI in International Marketing: Predictions and Possibilities

Despite all the current limitations we've covered, AI's future in international marketing looks promising. As technology advances, AI tools are expected to become more sophisticated, potentially overcoming some of the challenges they face today. 

With the integration of deep learning algorithms, AI tools may better understand and adapt to cultural nuances, idiomatic expressions, and regional variations. 

And it's already happening in many short-form areas.

SDL Government is an interface that translates social media news feeds in real-time to offer actionable insights to government officials.

Canopy Speak is a medical translator app that allows doctors to speak to non-English speaking patients. It's limited and only allows for one-way communication via text and speech translation, but it's there, and it's getting better all the time.

Even the US Army is using AI machine foreign learning translation systems to provide text-to-speech to soldiers.

However, for now, with the access to technology we have, there's no doubt that the hybrid approach is the most effective solution. 

If you're looking to translate a lot of content for the international stage, you must ensure it's done right. 

While AI can surely help with the bulk of the marketing translation process, the final product will still require a human touch that can handle the details and nuances of the process and your target language.

This combination allows marketers to harness the power of AI without sacrificing the human touch that makes marketing messages truly resonate. 

 

The Issue with AI Technology and Machine Translation

On the surface, all this sounds great, and it's amazing to see that such technology is coming so far, so quickly. Marketing copy, content, and multilingual marketing for your business has never been more accessible and easy to produce. 

But there is a potential dark side.

AI technology is one of the most controversial technologies that has ever existed.

In the words of author James Barrat, 'AI could be humanity's final invention,' as this tech is so innovative, it can train itself. Technology can now progress at a rate that we, as human beings, cannot even perceive.

Oh yes, that sounds deep. You may be thinking, well, how can AI tools and machine translation be so controversial?

It is, and it isn't.

The truth is AI like ChatGPT is a new technology that we don't truly understand.

Even the developers don't know how it works.

This has raised concerns that are already manifesting to this day.

As of March 2023, some of the biggest names in tech, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple), have signed a petition to pause the development of AI technologies for the next six months to prevent the technology from getting out of control.

While simple Chat-based NLP technology may not be an issue, when AI can start writing and executing its own code and can train itself to get better all the time, then things start to get very profound indeed.

Then there's the question of data.

So much data is being poured into AI models, either for training them or using them as a service.

There are examples of entire marketing campaigns being generated using AI. You can effectively translate your whole marketing base materials in a matter of minutes.

Where is this data going, and how is it being used?

These are the exact concerns Italy and China have with AI technology, two countries that have already banned ChatGPT from being accessible.

While it's too early to tell what will happen, it's certainly an interesting point to consider.

If you're heading towards a global marketing strategy and you have private data you want to keep to yourself, would processing this data via a platform like OpenAI be the best idea?

It's certainly an interesting thought experiment to consider.

 

Conclusion: AI in International Marketing - Not Yet Perfect, But Getting There

In conclusion, while AI tools have made significant advancements in the realm of international marketing, they are not yet perfect. 

Their current limitations in content creation and marketing translation, particularly when capturing cultural nuances and providing accurate transcreation, still demand human intervention and editing.

However, the future does look promising for AI in international marketing. 

With continuous development and integration of more sophisticated algorithms, AI tools will likely become better equipped to handle complex marketing tasks, including transcreation and cultural adaptation. 

For now, a hybrid approach that combines the efficiency of AI tools with the creativity and cultural understanding of human marketers seems to be the most effective strategy. This way, marketing teams can enjoy the benefits of AI without sacrificing the quality of their content and messaging. 

So, while we at Wolfestone currently offer AI translation services, we recognise that the technology is still evolving in terms of marketing content. 

We remain committed to providing our clients with the best possible solutions for their international marketing needs, whether that involves AI, human expertise, or a mixture of the two. 

As the landscape of AI continues to change, we'll be right there, staying ahead of the curve and offering our clients the most advanced, effective translation services.

Contact us today and see what marketing translation services we offer, and let us help you take your business to the international stage.