Google Translate recently celebrated 10 years of existence. There’s no dispute that its accuracy has increased as it’s gone from supporting a handful of languages to more than 103, but how accurate is Google Translate today? Can you rely on the results when communicating with someone in a foreign language?

Neural Machine Translation: Google’s Latest Translation Technology

Google Translate and other types of translation software have come a long way in fluency by translating whole sentences at a time rather than translating piece by piece. This is important because the meaning of words can change depending on the context. With a broader context, Google Translate can determine the most relevant translation. From there, it actually rearranges and adjusts the translation to sound more like a fluent speaker using Google’s new Neural Machine Translation.

Announced in 2016, this update produces smoother translated paragraphs and articles based on a computer system that learns over time. Right now, Neural Machine Translation is in place for eight language pairs representing more than one-third of the world’s population and over one-third of Google Translate queries.

The new technology is so accurate, in fact, that researchers called the results “unsettling” in an interview with MIT Technology Review.

If you’re using Google Translate to translate to or from English and Spanish, French, German, or other languages that now use Neural Machine Translation, you can expect better translation results than before.

Where Google Translate Misses

As with any translation tool, there are still plenty of areas where mistakes will be made. For example, the tool still doesn’t have common sense so it can mistranslate a sentence like, “The glass will not fit in the box because it’s too big.” In this case, the tool doesn’t understand which “it” is too big. This can be a problem in languages like Swedish in which nouns have two articles: “en” and “ett.” Swedish requires that adjectives and definitive articles to agree with the noun, so “big” can be “stor” for an en word, “stort” for an ett word, or “stora” for a plural noun. Glass is an ett word (ett glas) but box is an en word (en låda). Google Translate may believe the box is the “it” that is too big and mistranslate “it” and “big.”

Another smaller issue you may run into is the words Translate suggests aren’t commonly used or they don’t quite capture the same meaning. Words may be considered synonyms and used interchangeably by Google Translate, but they certainly don’t have the same meaning. For example, “intoxicated” is a synonym for “happy” or “thrilled,” but it also has another meaning and it may not be the right word in the context of your sentence.

The best way to use Google Translate and get an accurate answer is to use simple sentences free of complex structure. Review your sentence before you hit the translate button. Have you used any slang? Did you use correct grammar and sentence structure? Are there any words or sections that may be unclear, such as the example above with the glass? It also helps to have at least some familiarity with the other language to spot obvious problems you can correct yourself or tweak in your original sentence to improve your results.

The profit potential of podcasting makes it an attractive medium for a variety of content creators. You don’t need millions of followers to make a decent impact and increase your listenership in the podcasting game if you know what you’re doing. Producing transcripts of your podcasts is one step that even some of the experts in the field don’t take the effort to make. This can seriously help your enterprise as you attempt to grow. Transcribing audio is a key ingredient in any successful podcast for a number of reasons.

Immediate SEO Ranking Benefits

Despite all the malarkey you may have been hearing lately about SEO being dead, the fact of the matter is that traditional SEO still counts. Google and Bing continue to scan and index text when figuring out which sites or pages should sit at the top of their SERPs. While their algorithms are increasingly dependent on social media signals and visual data such as video and images, the search engine heavyweights primarily rely on text. A transcript of your podcasts will help you to get found online.

Organic Backlinks Generation

Though text versions of your podcasts are a great way to augment your SEO strategy, they’re even better at getting people to do your SEO for you. By making your audio searchable and presenting it in written form, you’re making it far easier for other people to link to it from their own sites. When bloggers have quotable pieces of text to latch onto, they’ll create organic backlinks to your content if it’s relevant. Long story short, text transcriptions encourage followers to powerfully promote your podcasts.

Content Creation Possibilities

Transcribing audio from podcasts allows podcasters to increase their content offerings in a number of ways. For instance, one could turn podcasts into newsletters or email blasts. You could also create entire e-books out of podcast content and sell it for a few bucks on Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Transcripts can also be edited to create blog posts or articles. Ultimately, the possibilities for re-purposing audio content into new formats are limited only by your imagination.

Superior User Experience

Nowadays, providing a great user experience for podcast and website followers alike is the name of the game if you want to get ahead. With so much content to choose from online, podcasters will suffer if they don’t include transcripts of their episodes. Some listeners can’t give their full attention to audio for whatever reason and like to follow along via the written word. Providing transcripts puts followers in the driver’s seat and allows them to consume your content on their terms.

Add-On Monetization Options

Another great thing about producing transcripts of podcasts is that they can be used to make extra money. For instance, you could distribute your text transcriptions around the web and pop in affiliate links that center on appropriate anchor text. Those links can produce income for years to come if you play your cards right. You could also insert links back to a subscription service like a paid email newsletter within your text as you see fit. Either way you slice it, transcribed podcast content can be monetized in a variety of creative ways.

Enhanced Social Media Marketing

While streaming audio services are ubiquitous on the Internet, they don’t exactly lend themselves to social sharing. Transcripts are a far better way to promote a podcast on networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. For instance, you could select choice quotes from every podcast that’ll pique the interest of potential listeners and post them to your social media profiles. By spreading text from your transcripts around the broader social media sphere, you can draw in far more followers and build hype. Transcripts or at least excerpts are just one more way to advertise.

A Boost in Perceived Reputation

Nowadays, consumers have learned to be very discerning when it comes to which podcasts they patronize. What’s more, podcasts have become increasingly polished and professional over the years. Even a lone podcaster without a studio can put out a great product for the cost of a hundred bucks worth of audio equipment. Lacking a well-edited transcript of episodes can make your podcast look amateurish and potentially scare off new listeners.

Getting Started with Transcription

In the end, transcribing podcasts is fairly straightforward and well worth the effort. Some programs like Dragon Dictation, Transcribe and Express Scribe can help you do it yourself. As great as those programs are, they’re not infallible. The most important step when running audio through a transcription program is to go through and manually edit it for formatting and spelling, assuming the program was fairly accurate in the first place. Another option is to use a professional transcription service like the one we offer here at TranslationJM.com. A real human will transcribe your podcast for you and deliver it in its finalized format. When you consider the cost vs time benefits, using a professional service often makes financial sense.

One last thing, once you have your transcripts, be sure to prominently display links to transcripts for each episode that you upload to the web.