Key Points on AI Translation for Businesses

With the advent of the internet and social media, market opportunities are becoming wider, but competition is also greater. As consumers, the ease of buying from companies in locations other than our own makes it possible to purchase products of different qualities, styles and prices that would otherwise not even have been an option. As marketers, this type of consumption presents the dilemma of the half-full or half-empty glass, as it can be seen as both a threat of losing that local customer, and an opportunity to gain buyers with whom there was no contact point before.

What has not changed, however, is the importance of communication in this process of attracting and keeping customers. Of course, one of the keys to this communication is language, because, how do we communicate with customers without a common language?

In today’s markets, to be able to offer ourselves to all our potential customers, facilitating communication by speaking their language is an undeniable competitive advantage, and translation through artificial intelligence is an excellent tool with a value for money that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, and which can be of great help to small and medium-sized companies with somewhat more limited resources.

Benefits

Its advantages, indicated by authors such as Pokorny (2024) or Shahmerdanova (2025), are quite clear:

1. Accessibility: Many of the tools are already accessible, even for free, to individuals and small businesses alike.
2. Speed and versatility: instant translation of large volumes, not only of text but also of multimedia materials, and into several languages.
3. Stability, as the quality offered is always the same.
4. Potential for improvement by training the artificial intelligence to use specific terms and styles.
5. User-friendliness, as it just needs copy pasting or uploading for the files to be translated.

However, it is also important to be aware of its limitations in order to be able to react appropriately and avoid negative impacts on our business. As we will see below, these limitations can become particularly critical when it comes to translations related to marketing communications or social media content.

Challenges and Limitations

Commercial translation, along with literary translation, is probably one of the most prolific in terms of double meanings, use of idioms and puns. And it is precisely in translating these kinds of literary resources that translation with artificial intelligence falters the most. In a similar fashion, the translation of nuances and connotations is just as difficult. And at a time like the present, when every company is looking to differentiate themselves from their competitors, the use and translation of these nuances can be what tips the balance in securing more than one client.

Another area that artificial intelligence does not yet handle satisfactorily is that of cultural adequacy. This is something that even professional (human) translators must constantly adjust to. A very basic example would be the translation of ‘you’ from English to Spanish: leaving aside the use of plural or singular, which can usually be inferred from the context, do we translate it as ‘tú’ (informal pronoun) or ‘usted’ (formal)? The answer will depend on factors such as the age or region of our target audience. This, along with the biased training that artificial intelligence presents in some cases, perpetuates translations lacking cultural sensitivity that can lead to ethical issues.

What if our product or service differentiation point relies on a clear cultural component, what if we use expressions specific to our culture to promote ourselves, or jokes? These kinds of cultural nuances, including humour, may be particularly tricky even for an experienced translator.

Managing Translation with AI

In conclusion, translation with artificial intelligence presents clear advantages and opportunities to expand the area of influence of companies, but it must be used with care and bearing in mind its current limitations in order to properly manage its challenges, which can lead to loss of customers and even result in poor reputation for our products (especially in the case of culturally inappropriate translations). It is for this reason that Shahmerdanova (2025) advocates a hybrid translation model, in which professional translators continue to train and review the results of artificial intelligence, so as to optimize the value for money of the final product.

References

Pokorny, E. (2024, octubre 23). Traducción IA: Cómo aprovecharla para traducir un sitio web. WEGLOT. https://www.weglot.com/es/blog/ai-translation

Shahmerdanova, R. (2025). Artificial Intelligence in Translation: Challenges and Opportunities. Acta Globalis Humanitatis et Linguarum, 2(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.69760/aghel.02500108