One of the most wondrous inventions in science fiction is the universal translator in Star Trek or the Babel fish in hitchhiker`s guide to the galaxy – a device (fish) that can easily and quite poignantly translate all kinds of texts. In Star Trek it is one of the keys to unite peoples and build a federation. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are bringing us now to the brink of actually breaking down the language barrier and I think this is one of, if not the biggest effect LLMs will have on our society.
Already now the translations are very good and can be modified to adhere to certain standards and maintain a better coherence in larger documents than the translation tools of the past.
Small translation prompt tip: Translate the text to [language] and rewrite it as if it were written by native speaker.
This ability will vastly improve soon with the next versions and we will be able to speak with anyone on the planet in our own tongue as software will start to integrate the technology and generate speech on the fly. It will not matter whether you speak Portuguese, Russian, German, Spanish, Norwegian, etc. The consequences are enormous. The internet was supposed to be borderless, but the language of the content remained a hard border to cross. LLMs can make it truly borderless.
For companies this means they can reach out with their products around the globe, in particular SaaS-companies and companies that are already shipping worldwide or selling digital goods and which do not require any physical presence in a country, but who struggle with adoption in different countries due to language barriers.
Software, documentation, training, marketing material will be built in one language and one language only. That language will probably be English (due to its dominance in the training data). Translations will then automatically be generated via LLMs. Companies will not have to maintain, update and in particular purchase translations anymore – software and websites can be localized completely by LLMs. Customer support will be offered 24/7 via bots, as questions will be translated to English to find the relevant content and the response will be composed in the local language. Content, e.g. this blog, can be translated can also be automatically translated.
LLMs will be the driving factor for the rumored one-man billion dollar company as one can run a truly international company without international teams and presences in markets. I am curious how quickly companies will adapt to this new reality. What I think companies should do:
- Abandon all (manual) translations and concentrate on English.
- Automate the translation process and use LLMs to support all international languages for which the LLMs are already good enough. (Languages that do not fit a given design, might be harder, e.g. hebraic)
- Integrate a customer support chatbot which answers all questions in the local language and offer automated translations of relevant documentation, training, etc. Additional support is offered via email, which can be automatically translated as well.
There are already services out there to translate videos, e.g. training and marketing videos, and it is just a question of time until live video conferencing software with real-time translation will hit the market. (e.g. https://www.vidvoice.ai/ is working on this.)
I feel bad for the translators and customer service agents, whose numbers I expect to drop due to the capabilities of LLMs, but on the other hand, as more companies internationalize, more companies might need people overlooking the translations and customer support queries, that LLMs do not answer well or require human intervention.
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