Business Trends
Self-Service Machine Translation for SAP Notes and Knowledge Base Articles
[UPDATED May, 2023]
Machine translation usage is ever increasing at SAP and is used in many applications. In 2018, it also became a reality for SAP Notes and SAP Knowledge Base Articles in the main channel of Product Support: The SAP ONE Support Launchpad. The service has been embedded into the SAP ONE Support Launchpad for many years now and provides immediate access to machine translated SAP Notes and SAP Knowledge Base Articles in 10 languages. Since 2018 our machine translation service for SAP Notes and KBAs has been used to translate almost 13 million documents.
You may wonder what will happen when customers and internal users are redirected from SAP ONE Support Launchpad to the new customer interaction space, SAP for Me. Great news, automatic translation of SAP Notes and KBAs stays even when SAP ONE Support Launchpad goes!
When it comes to implementing an SAP Note or SAP Knowledge Base Articles, customers are able to read the content in their native or preferred language via self-service machine translation for multiple languages, removing language barriers for even more customers.
In SAP for Me SAP Notes and SAP Knowledge Base Articles are displayed automatically according to the user’s browser language settings if they are among the 10 languages that are supported by machine translation. These languages are German, English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russia, Korean and Italian. If your browser language is outside the 10 languages, all content will be displayed in English.
Features of Self-Service Machine Translation in the SAP for Me:
- Immediate access to machine translated SAP Notes and SAP Knowledge Base Articles.
- Machine translation in real time, powered by SAP’s neural machine translation engines (SAP Translation Hub) in multiple languages.
- Directly available in SAP for Me.
How does it work?
- Set up your preferred language in your browser.
- Open an SAP Note or SAP Knowledge Base Article in SAP for Me. (link: https://me.sap.com/notes/<NoteNumber>).
- The SAP Note or SAP Knowledge Base Article is displayed based on your browser language settings.
- If your browser language is not set to the language that you need translation for, choose the ‘Available Languages’ tab and select ‘Machine Translation’ for available languages.
- The same browser window is refreshed displaying the machine translation with a disclaimer and information about how to submit feedback (link to Qualtrics survey).
For more information, see:
SAP Knowledge Base Article 2613605 – Automatic translation feature in SAP ONE Support Launchpad
Thanks for sharing, Fabio Almeida !
This seems interesting but I can't help but feel skeptical if this isn't again SAP pursuing what Google has achieved long time ago. 🙂 (Like the seemingly endless SAP's pursuit of better search.)
How does this translation stack up against Google Translate (which I used before to translate some notes from German to English)? I'd expect for the SAP translation to perform better since it should know the SAP terminology but I'd have to see it to believe it. I'm wondering if SAP team has already done such comparison and could share the results.
Thank you!
Dear Jelena,
I was wondering the same - so I did some tests translating improvement requests, that customer have submitted to SAP to improve our products, from English into German. I compared Google Translate vs. the new SAP Translation Service.
The SAP translation performed much better, not only because of the SAP terms taking into account, but also because the structure of the sentences were better to understand.
Of course, this is only my personal experience.
Best regards
Daniel-Alexander Heller
Hello Jelena Perfiljeva
Thanks for your comments and interest!
We performed several test cycles internally before going live with the Japanese and Portuguese languages. We also invited local customers and user groups to make this validation. And, at the moment, the same is happening for the other languages in scope.
We have compared the results, as you proposed.
The SAP Translation Hub understands and translate the technical terms from SAP, using SAPterms tool. The other translation tools keep the structure of the sentences simpler, but does not understand/translate the technical terms from SAP.
For sure, there are translation tools in the market for a long time. The advantage of our API is the translation of the SAP business context. All tests performed so far showed us an accuracy level more than 90% (quality of machine translation).
Thanks & Kind Regards,
Fábio Almeida
Thank you. Maybe this calls for a follow-up blog? Most of the SCN members are usually interested in the technical aspects of such changes more than in just announcements. 🙂
Hi Jelena Perfiljeva,
I am working on it, checking some details to provide a more tech info.
Thanks & Kind Regards,
Fábio
Providing content in the local language of our users is yet another way to improve the quality of our work. This is a great initiative!
Best,
Alice
Thanks for your feedback, Alice Otero!
We are working to improve it even further!
Regards,
Fábio
Hi,
i am still waiting on the german translation.
Wondering why it takes so long for ML company SAP to fix this complicated language problem?
Hello Robert,
Thanks for your interest.
We have changed our platform on background. Language translation will be now generated automatically by using SAP Leonardo APIs.
Next languages will be Spanish and Chinese-simplified. German is planned for future waves.
Kind Regards,
Fábio