There is no hard limit at the moment, but it’s recommended to keep the size of each individual item under 4kB. This corresponds to 4,000 characters encoded as UTF-8 and 2,000 characters encoded as UTF-16. Uploading longer texts won’t yield any errors, but might get refused by some external translation engines integrated in Localazy.

We can gauge how good a Machine Translation Engine is by the accuracy of the translation, conciseness, consistency of output, and how many language pairs they offer.

Localazy offers four major machine translation engines to use when translating your content (available with the Additional MT feature enabled).

Use English, which is unquestionably the best language to pair with another language for machine translations because translations from and to English give the best results overall. That’s why it is also a good idea to select English as the source language for your projects in Localazy.

As for the engine itself, each one has its pros and cons:

• Google Translate is the most popular and offers many languages and language pairs with a reasonably accurate translation, making it the best average option.
• DeepL is becoming quickly better and better and is great for more technical terms. It is usually also very concise but has a lower variety of language pairs.
• Amazon Translate still has a somewhat fluctuating quality; it can be very high or pretty low, but you can use it for free with Localazy.
• Microsoft Azure has fewer available language options and average quality.

The best thing you can do is combine and compare multiple machine translation outputs and decide on the best results with backward translations and other checks.

Machine Translations (MT) are an incredible invention that makes our life easier. But sometimes, their accuracy is low, and translating large amounts of texts will inevitably produce outputs of varying quality.

Translating strings to a language you don’t know well with MT engines can be a pain because you might not fully understand what’s truly in there.

What can you do to ensure consistent quality levels of machine translation output? Localazy offers some solutions you might want to consider:

• If you are conducting the translations yourself, try to use Additional MT Engines to get more suggestions, allowing you to compare and decide.
• If you don’t want to spend your time with machine translation post-editing and checking, try the Human-Assisted Machine Translations service by Localazy and get machine translations checked for a fair price per word.

The advantages of machine translation are:

• Multiple free translation engines as options, like Google, DeepL, etc
• A myriad of language pairs, from English-Portuguese to Russian-Zulu
• Instantaneous translations. You can translate in real-time.
• Machine learning mechanisms are improving, meaning that every day the services are getting better.

The disadvantages of machine translation:

• Language pairing accuracy without English can be very low, giving it some limitations
• Risk of incorrect translation.
• Translation Engines struggle with context while translating.
• Mistakes might create irreversible situations.

How to mitigate the disadvantages of MT?

Accuracy, context, and mistakes are solvable by using Human-assisted Machine Translation and Machine Translation + Post-Editing.

You can employ both of these methods while using Localazy to achieve the best possible quality of machine translations.

When translating content, it’s common to encounter duplicate phrases or sentences. Translating these duplicates multiple times not only consumes valuable time and resources but also risks inconsistencies in translations. Here are some strategies to save on translations of duplicate content:

Use Key Clustering: Key Clustering automatically identifies and groups keys with identical values, eliminating the need to translate the same content multiple times. This not only saves time and resources but also ensures consistency across translations.

Leverage Duplicity Linking: Duplicity Linking allows you to link multiple keys with the same content. When one key is translated, all linked keys are automatically updated with the new translation. This reduces the time spent on translating duplicate content.

Utilize Machine Translations (MT): Machine Translations can provide initial translations for your content, which can then be reviewed and refined by human translators. This can speed up the translation process and reduce costs.

Remember, the key to saving on translations of duplicate content is to leverage the right tools to streamline the translation process and ensure consistency across all translations.

Currently, there are two built-in engines that take your glossary terms into account when translating:

1. DeepL integration
2. Google Translate integration

While these integrations provide helpful translation capabilities, please note that the output of these engines and their models cannot be guaranteed to be 100% reliable. We cannot take responsibility for the translations they provide. The accuracy depends on the language pair (English as source is recommended) and the provider performance.

Another way to translate your strings automatically with glossary terms respected is to configure the OpenAI integration for your account.

Remember: It is always recommended to follow machine and AI translation with a human review. If you don’t have the workforce available for reviewing your MT translations in-house, you can activate our Human-Assisted Machine Translation service.

To set up OpenAI integration with Localazy:

1. Obtain Your OpenAI API Key – Sign up at the OpenAI platform, create/select a project, generate a secret API key, and set up billing.
2. Connect with Localazy AI – Go to Console -> Localazy AI, select your organization, enable AI assistance, and paste your OpenAI API key. Choose your preferred OpenAI model and save the settings.
3. Configure AI Options – Customize AI features for your project, including translation suggestions and bulk pre-translation.

Learn more about the Localazy AI options in the docs