Despite the fact that global digital transformation (DX) is something that all businesses must work towards, the sad truth is that most of them tend to fail in their efforts, especially when it comes to justifying the expenditure.

Now, with IDC predicting that DX expenditure across the globe will touch a mind-bending $2 trillion by 2020, it means that a good $1.6 trillion could just end up getting written off.

That begs a question – if generating ROI on worldwide digital transformation is so complex, why indulge in it in the first place?

Well, there are several reasons. To begin with, there are significant rewards that come from digitising a business and disrupting a market. If success is achieved, the concerned company will gain a significant share in the market and boost profitability, while building a sustainable business.

Secondly, if you don’t do it, your competitors are going to anyway. Finally, the causes of failure can always be overcome; it just needs better planning. Possible failure is a weak excuse.

So, if you’re wondering how you can achieve digital transformation across your global business, here are a few strategies.

Have a digital vision

You need a strategy that can get the buy-in of those at the top. This vision must be in alignment with the entire business for the purpose of a smoother execution. More importantly, it must be made clear that DX is more than marketing or technology; it’s a complete change in the way your organisation conducts business.

Mark business drives

Conduct an assessment of whether you want to focus on business innovation or technology operations. Find out where your position is within that spectrum. Look at your operations from the perspective of process, technology, and people. Consider the inefficiencies that currently exist in your business processes.

Assess and give importance to IT initiatives

What are you aiming for? Are you looking to improve your internal processes or do you want to boost your project management and technology standards? Is your focus going to be on improving customer satisfaction and value by delivering the right experiences, products, services, and content?

These are important questions to ask.

Ensure alignment

Make sure there are no gaps. Determine what technologies you need and train your workforce accordingly for better implementation. If there are skill gaps, arrange for proper training and focus on developing talents.

Reinforce your IT department with entrepreneurs, strategic visionaries, and project planners; not just technology enablers.

Alter IT strategy based on need

DX is an ongoing phase, which means priorities will change. Recognise this and adjust strategies whenever necessary.

Once you manage to create an effective digital strategy, you can reap the benefits of working in an improved digital workplace and having greater stakeholder engagement. All you need is proper planning for operational efficiency, customer value, and growth/innovation.

It’s clear that businesses, today, have to make the most of technology to stay in the race. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and other such technology allow businesses to gain a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace. Thanks to globalisation, translation is one area that’s recently been given the AI treatment.

So, how does AI actually aid translation? Well, that’s what we are here to find out.

It’s Called Machine Translation

AI-aided translation is called machine translation. What it does is that it converts text from the source language to text in the output language. There exist a range of machine translation programs that businesses can use for their translation needs.

However, the two most common happen to be SMT-based i.e. Statistical Machine Translation and RBMT-based i.e. Rule-Based Machine Translation.

The latter operates on the idea that language is all about syntactic and grammatical rules. So, in order to work, these programs refer to bilingual dictionaries for the specified languages. These dictionaries are composed of linguistic rules that apply to the sentence structures in each of the specified languages. Then, there are rules to help the program link the sentence structures of each language.

However, the process is time-consuming as new requirements have to be met each time a new language is paired with the source language. Even so, RMBT is effective when it comes to pairing languages with very different word orders, such as English to Chinese.

On the other hand, SMT works on the concept of probabilities. Google Translator is an example of this. What the tool does it refers to a set of target segments and chooses the most probable segments as a match to the source segment. To put it simply, Google Translator translates by looking at the highest statistical probability.

SMT works better than RMBT because it can accommodate a wide-range of languages. It does not depend on an extensive list of resources to get the job done.

So, that’s how AI-translation works.

The Future of AI Translation

Machine translation will definitely evolve as time goes by. However, human translation is still very relevant as context plays a major role in effective translation. This is completely dependent on human involvement.

For instance, colloquialism is something that machines still cannot figure out. So, machine translation is still primarily a tool aimed at simplifying the process, rather than taking it over.