Review and edit AI translations in Smartcat Editor

You have just translated a document, web page, video, PDF or other piece of content using Smartcat's AI automatic translation , which usually takes seconds or a few minutes at most. Now, you want to verify the resulting translation and make edits to ensure its quality, that it adheres to your brand voice, style, and terminology.

Thankfully, AI translation is good at learning about your content and already starts at about 80% accuracy, depending on the language pair. Then, it further learns from your edits in what we can adaptive learning loops. You never need to edit or fix the same segment of text twice to ensure its accuracy, as it's all saved in your central record of content. Translations are correctly applied to all future content. You can choose to change the correct translation at any time if you or your company have decided that a different message or turn of phrase is needed.

The first step is of course to translate your content with Smartcat AI. If you have translated a document and landed on the screen below, click on “Open Editor”.

You can also reach the Editor by clicking on the file in the Files section of your project, as seen here:

You can also see in this view that it has been pre-translated by Smartcat AI.

Next, you'll go to the Smartcat Editor, which shows both languages in two parallel columns, the source text on the left and the corresponding AI translation on the right showed in so-called “strings” or segments. It's not done sentence by sentence as this doesn't always ensure that the original format is kept when you go to export it afterward.

To make the edits, you simply type right into the text box for the translation of each segment. Once you are done with your correction, you can check the box on the right side of the segment to show that it has been done, i.e. this confirms that this segment has been both post-edited and confirmed for accuracy.

If you forget to confirm each segment you have post-edited, you can confirm them all at once by clicking on the icon on the top left corner and then selecting “confirm all segments.”

You can follow the progress of your post-editing on the top right, which will indicate how much of the file you have indeed completed. You'll also see if the initial AI translation was complete.

You will see a small yellow warning sign if you have any spelling or grammar mistakes to pay attention to:

This will help you keep quality high. This will also be shown in the quality section of the sidebar as well as in the file preview:

There are so many great features, shortcuts, and tools to be found in the Smartcat Editor that can help you in your post-editing.

Click the following icon or F9 to go the next uncomfirmed segment that needs to be post-edited, verified or checked. You can then confirm it once you are satisfied with the translation.

You can go to a specific segment by number. This is useful if you and your team are collaborating and discussing one segment in particular. All segments are numbered.

The next icon is your typical undo and redo buttons.

You can copy the source text to the translation. Sometimes you need this if you want to keep the source language in the translation as well, like with specific terms for example.

You can also clear the translation, i.e. the target language segment if you want to completely re-do the translation.

The replace option is your typical replace option if you want to replace a term with another all at once.

AI actions – You can edit translations with one click of the button using AI actions. These are prompts that will edit the target text instantaneously. You have rephrase, shorten, translate with GPT, fix punctuation, and fix grammar. You can also create your prompts if you have a Unite or Enterprise subscription plan.

You can add a special character, like a symbol.

You can also select the segment max length, which can be crucial for copy on websites and in designs to make sure they don't go over the allotted space.

If you want to revert the segment to a previous stage, meaning to AI translated, post-edited, proofread, etc. click on this next icon. That will signal that it needs to be re-done.

You can create a custom dictionary for each file and store this within your linguistic assets.

Concordance search means that you can find terms that might fit this particular word to ensure that it fits your brand voice and terminology.

As you post-edit the translation, you can also see a preview of it in the Smartcat Editor.

This can come in handy to understand the context of the translation. You can see previews of your documents, presentations, PDFs, videos, designs, websites, and more. Never translate blindly, use the preview for specific results!

When you are done with the post-editing, you can two things:

• Export the resulting file, i.e. the translation.

You can export the resulting file with confirmed edits or with uncomfirmed edits. Downloading it here is great if you want to simply upload a file for translation and download it again to be used immediately.

You can also click “Done.” This will notify your project manager that you are done post-editing. They can then have the text re-checked by internal reviewers for example.

Clicking “Done” will also ensure that any continuously localization workflow setups know that the translation is complete and can be pulled into the integrated platform(s) automatically. For example, this is the case with Smartcat integrations like WordPress, Salsify, Google Docs, Google spreadsheet, and more.

And that concludes how you post-edit translations and use the Smartcat Editor!