Localization not only boosts your ROI and increases open rates but is also essential for both legal and ethical reasons. If you’ve hesitated because of the time required to translate and maintain multilingual content, GenAI is your solution. Let’s get started.

Key takeaways:

1. GenAI significantly reduces the time needed for email localization without compromising quality.
Given the current limitations of GenAI, the role of human oversight in refining outputs for precise and culturally relevant translations remains crucial.

GenAI excels at adapting email content for different cultural contexts and situations, enhancing cultural awareness. It also has the capability to validate your content (both copy and visual) for cultural relevance.

Setting specific guidelines for GenAI ensures consistency and customization while maintaining your brand’s voice across languages and regions.

Benefits of using GenAI for email localization

GenAI can’t fully automate localization processes and still requires human input; however, this allows for valuable human oversight, which is beneficial. So, why should you use GenAI for email localization, and what are the advantages?

Benefits of using GenAI for email localization

1. Time-effectiveness: Using GenAI translation with human post-editing can significantly speed up the email translation process, making it highly cost-effective—the less time spent, the lower the cost.
2. Cultural insights: GenAI provides a quicker way to learn about the customs and traditions of your global audience, helping you deliver content that resonates. To be exact, it provides you with aggregated information about the target country(-ies). 
3. Cultural relevance of imagery: GenAI can quickly check your imagery for cultural relevance, ensuring appropriateness.
4. Idiom translation: GenAI excels at translating idioms, even when human translators do not recognize them in the source language. This preserves the idioms in the translated copy.
5. Tone consistency: Maintaining your brand’s tone in translations is crucial. You can use GenAI tools to tweak the copy before passing it to a human editor, ensuring tone consistency.
6. Name verification: GenAI can accurately verify the names of your recipients in any language, saving you significant time.
7. Personalized content: GenAI can tailor content based on customer preferences, weather, location, slang, and professional jargon, ensuring that your offers are relevant and appealing.

GenAI-assisted translations

Here, we focus exclusively on GenAI translations augmented by human post-editing for email content. Using translations without human oversight or solely edited by GenAI is risky and not recommended for email marketing. However, companies such as Booking.com and Airbnb have successfully used GenAI-only translations for their email communications. This method is also suitable for translating Help Center content and ChatBots.

Before we delve into the benefits of GenAI translations with a human post-editing approach, let’s define it. Essentially, translations are first conducted using GenAI tools, which are highly effective. A native-speaking translator then refines these initial translations.

So, why this method, and why not just a traditional approach by human translators?

Benefits of using GenAI translations with human post-editing:

• accuracy: While GenAI often grasps the main message, it can still miss nuances or translate inaccuracies, leading to potential miscommunication;
• cultural relevance: GenAI assists by adapting terminology to regional differences — for example, referring to “chips” correctly in the United Kingdom and the United States or translating “slippers” as “thongs” in Australia and “flip-flops” in the United States. However, a native-speaking translator should review these adaptations to ensure accuracy;
• situational relevance: GenAI might not be up-to-date with current events in your target audience’s country, which could affect content appropriateness. A human review is crucial to address this;
• consistency in terminology: GenAI can adhere to specific terms from your glossary. For enhanced accuracy, you can set these terms in the Custom Instructions for GenAI, but it’s beneficial to have a human review to ensure terminology consistency across various documents and align it with your website content;
• last, but not least, time and cost-efficienct: this approach is shown to be 70–80% faster and 20–30% more cost-effective than the traditional method.

Email localization involves more than just translating text; it encompasses a comprehensive approach to multilingual email marketing. We’ve compiled an eBook titled “Email Localization,” which offers practical tips on how to start and excel in multilingual email marketing.

How to train GenAI for better translation results

Although a native speaker checks all the translations, you might want to improve the output from GenAI to provide the native speaker with more accurate texts. The better the initial texts, the better the final translations your recipients will see. Who knows, maybe this could even enable you to send urgent promotional emails without human supervision in the future.

So, what do we need to do to get the best possible results from GenAI?

• specify your target audience’s country: Entering the specific country or region of your target audience ensures that GenAI aligns its translations and cultural references to the local context appropriately;
• set custom instructions: Configure GenAI with specific guidelines to ensure consistent terminology and brand voice. Clearly outline preferred vocabulary, tone, and style to match your brand’s identity;
• review and feedback: Regularly review and provide feedback on translations to help the AI learn and improve. This iterative process allows GenAI to refine its outputs over time;
• train with real examples: Use actual examples of past successful translations to train GenAI. Providing it with high-quality, contextually relevant examples can significantly enhance its performance;
• update continuously: Keep GenAI updated with new terms, vocabulary, idioms, and cultural insights. This ensures that GenAI remains current and effective in different linguistic contexts.

Wrapping up

As we’ve seen, GenAI has the potential to transform email localization by making it faster and more responsive to cultural nuances. By combining GenAI’s capabilities with crucial human oversight, businesses can ensure that their messages resonate on a global scale while maintaining the integrity and personality of their brand. The future of email marketing lies in leveraging these advanced tools to meet the diverse needs of a global audience efficiently.