Unbabel leads innovation in how businesses communicate across languages and cultures. The need for seamless quality translation services is growing higher with the world growing ever more interconnected. Unbabel is setting a new standard in the language services industry through its unique mix of the power of AI and human expertise.
History of Unbabel
A Bit of History
Unbabel was founded in 2013 by Vasco Pedro, João Graça, and Hugo Silva from Lisbon, Portugal, with one mission from the very beginning: to make language translation as seamless and really accessible to everybody. Its founders did know very well that mainstream translation services are either very slow or very expensive. Machine translation lacked the required accuracy and nuance in most cases. They saw a solution in how to combine the strengths of humans and machines to enable fast, reliable, and affordable translations.
The Challenges of Global Communication
Businesses today operate within a very complex system of linguistic and cultural barriers that need to be traversed to reach customers, partners, and stakeholders located everywhere. Traditional methods of translation relied either solely on human translators or basic machine translation that typically falls short of delivering the level of accuracy, speed, and cost-effectiveness which is required for effective communication internationally.
Human translators are competent but slow and pricey for large volumes. Machine translation tools, on their part, are fast and affordable but lack subtle language, cultural context, and the tone and style particular to your brand. This could give rise to translations that do not reach the local audience, very often cutting down on global marketing and customer engagement initiatives of any company.
Hybrid Approach: AI-driven Machine Translation with Human Translators
Hybrid Approach: Unbabel Sets a Difference
Unbabel does this with quite a different hybrid model, putting together the power of AI-driven machine translation with human translators. An innovative model such as this allows businesses to gather all benefits from the speed and scalability of machine translation while holding sway over quality and accuracy through human review and post-editing.
At the heart of the Unbabel platform lies its licensed, proprietary AI that is trained on millions of sentences translated and always learning. An AI-powered engine like this makes it possible to quickly translate content into a huge number of diverse languages—everything from very common ones like English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese to much more niche languages like Icelandic and Swahili.
However, Unbabel understands that this is still not good enough to reach the quality and brand consistency required by corporate brands. The company has therefore built a community of professional human translators around the world that scrutinizes machine translations and further refines them for accuracy, cultural appropriateness, and brand voice.
Configurable Workflows and Quality Control
A critical component of Unbabel’s platform is the ability to tailor this translation workflow based on the needs of each client from exceptionally fast and inexpensive “good enough” translations to more refined, higher-quality versions that are carefully reviewed by human editors.
In this process, Unbabel’s AI-driven quality estimation tool is of much help by automatically assessing the quality level for every machine translation and selecting whether that needs human review. This enables the platform to optimize the translation workflow by automating it for content that meets the desired quality standard and intelligently routing more complex or sensitive material to the human review team.
That level of personalization and quality control is especially useful for businesses whose content ranges across marketing materials, customer support documentation, technical manuals, and so on. Unbabel’s customers are able to effectively tailor their translation strategy in a way that high-priority, brand-critical content gets treated with the utmost care, while that which is routine or of lower impact can easily be translated by less expensive, less intensive means.
Seamless Integration and Scalability
Fully Integrated and Scalable
The Unbabel platform was architected to feed directly into businesses’ existing tools and workflows from their current content management systems and marketing automation platforms to customer service platforms and eCommerce solutions to avoid much of the potential chaos and reduce loss of time.
Scalability is another major asset of this platform, empowering every business to handle any translation need, be it occasional ad hoc or large in scale and ongoing. Backed by the Unbabel AI-induced machine and a worldwide community of human translators, it will be easier to scale up quickly and affordably to support the growing global operations of companies looking to make inroads into new markets and communicate with their customers in languages of their choice.
Driving Business Impact
It is in this backdrop that Unbabel’s hybrid solution to translation has proved to be a groundbreaking across industries. Going beyond traditional models of translation, the clients have been able to achieve major business impact in a couple of ways:
1. Improved Customer Experience:
It means that content and support in customers’ native languages improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement. Clients of Unbabel have received higher customer satisfaction scores, reduced support ticket resolution times, and increased conversion rates of multilingual websites and marketing campaigns.
2. Faster Global Expansion:
Fast and cost-effective, Unbabel’s translation services allow for the rapid and effective launch of products and services into new international markets, decreasing time and resources spent on localization.
3. Greater Brand Consistency:
Unbabel’s human review process ensures that translations reflect the brand voice and tone of the client thus building trust and credibility with local audiences and reinforcing a cohesive global brand identity.
4. Greater Operational Efficiency:
By way of automating routine translation tasks and optimize workflows, Unbabel’s clients have managed to redirect resources toward more strategic initiatives, elevating overall operational efficiency and productivity.
Factors that make Unbabel’s Translations more Accurate compared to other Machine Translation Services
What makes Unbabel’s translations more accurate compared to other machine translation services?
There are some main primary reasons that make Unbabel’s translations more accurate compared to other machine translation services:
1. Proprietary Large Language Model:
Unbabel designed and trained its own proprietary LLM specifically for translation tasks; therefore, TowerLLM outperforms LLMs such as GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, which are oriented toward general-purpose applications.
2. Curated Training Data:
Unbabel curated a high-quality dataset of translations to tune and train TowerLLM rather than mixed-quality data from the public. That will ensure it has a strong foundation in accurate and fluent translations.
3. Specialised Fine-Tuning:
In addition to the core LLM, Unbabel further trains its TowerLLM on specialized tasks like named entity recognition, source correction, and machine post-editing to deal with more complex language structures and subtleties.
4. Quality Estimation:
Unbabel uses an AI-powered Quality Estimation tool to automatically estimate the quality of the Machine Translations produced. This would help detect cases where human review and editing are required to bring up the accuracy of translation output.
5. Human Review and Editing:
Translations that fall below the standard set by Unbabel maintain an authentic human review and editing process with professional human translators, making corrections to the output and increasing its accuracy.
6. Multilinguality:
TowerLLM was trained from scratch to be multilingual, over data for 18 language pairs. This gives it an advantage over models trained on a few key languages.
In other words, what Unbabel does is brings together powerful AI models, high-quality training data, and implemented quality control processes using human capabilities to get more accurate and reliable translations than a general MT service. This makes Unbabel distinctly fit for mission-critical business applications that require accurate, on-brand communication.
Case Studies
Let’s now look at some case studies on how companies were able to successfully integrate Unbabel into their operations.
Case Study 1: Trello
One of the popular management tools, Trello, had an issue of lacking support for the global userbase. Its user base was from more than 190 countries and the platform was supposed to smoothly run multilingual activities for Trello. Integrating Unbabel into the support platform at Trello allowed it to provide timely and accurate support to end-users everywhere. This reduced response times and support costs but increased customer satisfaction.
Case Study 2: Skyscanner
Skyscanner, one of the leading travel search engines, leveraged Unbabel to localize its webpage and marketing content across several international markets. The core of this multilingual offering was to equip Skyscanner with the possibility of increasing users and driving further conversions. With Unbabel providing a scalable solution, Skyscanner was in a position to expand without building an extensive in-house team of translators.
Case Study 3: Microsoft
Microsoft had partnered with Unbabel to extend and raise the quality of customer support operations. By integrating its translation services into the support workflows, Microsoft could offer multilingual support to customers across regions. Because of this, Microsoft retained very high levels of customer satisfaction while continuing to drive efficiencies in customer support.
Unbabel Pricing
Pricing
Unbabel’s pricing plans are versatile, duly fitting various businesses. Pricing generally depends on parameters like the volume of translation, languages, and business requirements.
Here’s the main pricing options that Unbabel offers:
- PAY-AS-YOU-GO: From $0.00020 per word. No minimum commitment
- STARTER: From $0.00018 per word. Minimum $10,000 annual commitment
- STANDARD: From $0.00017 per word. Minimum $30,000 annual commitment
- ENTERPRISE: From $0.00015 per word. Minimum $120,000 annual commitment
The Future of Global Communication
The Future of Global Communication
There has never been a greater need than now for high-quality and scalable translation services in a world that is becoming increasingly global. Unbabel is the leading company in language services that will make a difference in global communications’ future because of its innovative way of joining AI with human know-how.
The company is constantly investing in research and development to increase the capabilities of its AI models and expand the language coverage. Some areas that will be focused on in the near future include:
- AI Advancements
- New Language Pairs
- Industry-Specific Solutions
- Enhanced User Experience
- Ethical AI and Fair Work Practices
Conclusion
Unbabel offers businesses a unique solution for languages, delivering great customer service on a global scale. By using both human experience and machine translation technology, Unbabel empowers companies to deliver smooth, personalized interactions no matter where in the world customers live or what language they may speak.
Whether it be a small business looking to grow its presence or a large enterprise business serving diverse stakeholders, Unbabel can become a very instrumental tool for it. With quality, innovation, and ethics at the top of the list, Unbabel defines a future in which communication—globally—can and should be inclusive and customer experience second to none.
In case you wish to break down language barriers and relate to your customers, then Unbabel is something you should definitely look into. Great communication is instrumental in creating trust and loyalty; Unbabel can be the bridge to take your business to the next higher level of international success.
