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Nowadays, any large automobile production involves people from different countries and uses documents in many languages. Marketing, sales, warranty services are offered and provided in dozens of languages and dialects. So it is not surprising that car market leaders are increasingly using machine translation.
In this article we will consider the most common ways in which a machine translation reduces costs and increases income in the automotive industry.
Areas of application of machine translation in the automotive business
The globalisation of the automotive industry requires fast and efficient translation of huge amounts of information. Machine translation is becoming an indispensable tool at all stages of production and promotion:
Organising a worldwide supply network
For decades now, the auto industry has been a global phenomenon. Raw materials are mined on one continent, components are produced on another, and assembly occurs on a third.
As a result, car production has become a multinational, and therefore multilingual, business. All participants need to understand each other – and here it is machine translation that comes into play.
Senior managers are negotiating supplies – and here machine translation can seriously facilitate communication with foreign colleagues.
Components must be delivered quickly and safely – machine translation provides communication with the transport company and warehouses.
At an assembly plant, workers must receive clear instructions and technical characteristics of components – that can be also done by machine translation.
When you order new equipment or software for the plant itself or supply ordering foreign components for a network of auto repair shops – machine translation comes to help for a multitude of different tasks.
Localization on a new market
Car manufacturers strive to enter foreign markets, but often the goal is not only to sell cars in a new country, but also to start production locally.
This requires an establishment of a huge number of interlingual contacts between the manufacturer and the government agencies, the manufacturer and the local suppliers, between foreign and local employees within the same company.
In each of these cases machine translation can facilitate the communication problem if not completely solve it.
Certification and user manuals
Any automaker on a new market must not only obtain all the necessary certificates from local authorities, but also speak to its customers in their language.
This means you need to translate user manuals, technical specifications and other documentation, which machine translation does an excellent job of. Machine translation combined with speech recognition and generation technologies can also make various types of video instructions or guides understandable.
In addition, language models can be adapted to specific requirements of a company, which will make new translations more accurate and relevant.
Marketing, advertising, online sales
Promoting and selling cars in different countries – that's a task that demonstrates full force and versatility of machine translation. You need to correct your brand names if necessary or take into account various dialects and features of national culture – all this enormous work becomes much easier with the use of machine translation.
For example, British English slang is distinct in many ways from American English slang, dialects of Spanish language in Spain and Latin America are completely different, French in France does not coincide in everything with French in Canada.
Machine translation, of course, is not yet ideal in understanding the context or irony, but it reduces the volume, time and money costs of translations in the field of marketing and advertising many times over.
However, there is a process in which machine translation has no valid competitors – translation of sites and online stores, product descriptions, mobile applications for car sales and warranty service.
Potential buyers are increasingly looking for their dream cars on the Internet – they compare different models, surf through dealer web pages and select configurations for themselves. Without machine translation, multiple human translators will have to translate your site manually for weeks or months piecemeal, and then coordinate their translations. Machine translation will do the same in a couple of days, or even hours.
Instant translation of a large volume of text into many languages, chatbots for communication with foreign clients – various applications of machine translation greatly increase creation and distribution of your content, as well as quality of service in any market.
Also, imagine you are a chain of car service stations, and your country attracts a lot of foreign tourists or active international traffic flows. It will be very reasonable to translate your website into the languages of your potential clients in order to attract new clients.
Machine translation: a competitive advantage for the automotive business
Estimates of growth in the machine translation market over the next 6-8 years range from 13.5 percent to 22.8 percent annually.
Thus, global machine translation software sales could grow more than 7 times by 2032 compared to 2023, exceeding $7 billion.
One of the main roles in this growth of the machine translation market has already been played by the automotive industry, say analysts that compiled Machine Translation Market Size and Growth Insights.
Thus, many automakers have already seen the advantages of machine translation, such as:
- speed,
- affordable prices,
- security (in case of using on-premise software solutions).
Automakers all over the world increasingly bet on machine translation and invest heavily in appropriate software and services.
By and large, if you are – an automaker or an auto parts supplier, a car dealer or a service station network and do not yet use machine translation, then...
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