Business Trends
Self-Service Machine Translation for SAP Notes and Knowledge Base Articles in the SAP ONE Support Launchpad
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.
When it comes to implementing an SAP Note or SAP Knowledge Base Articles, increasing numbers of customers will be able to read the content in their native or preferred language as we introduce self-service machine translation for multiple languages, removing language barriers for even more customers.
So far, we were only able to offer Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese; however, with technology advances, machine translated content is now also available in Spanish, Simplified Chinese, French, Italian, Russian, Korean and German. And, for those SAP Notes and SAP Knowledge Base articles written in German, there is machine translated content available in English.
Features of Self-Service Machine Translation in the SAP ONE Support Launchpad:
- Fast access to machine translated SAP Notes/SAP Knowledge Base Articles.
- Real-time machine translation powered by SAP’s neural machine translation engines (SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation MT) in multiple languages.
- Available directly in the SAP ONE Support Launchpad display.
How does it work?
- User accesses an SAP Note or SAP Knowledge Base Article in the SAP ONE Support Launchpad.
- They choose the Languages tab and can select ‘Machine Translation’ for available languages
- A new browser window opens to display the machine translation with a disclaimer and information about how to submit feedback. Please note that these translations are not reviewed for accuracy and provide a general overview only.
For more information, see:
SAP Knowledge Base Article 2613605 – Automatic translation feature in SAP ONE Support Launchpad
In-house Technology
The SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation MT considers 25 years of SAP Terms and translation memory content and aims to translate the entire sentence/paragraph within the correct technical and business context. Language quality has been reviewed by internal Product Support engineers as well as linguists from Globalization Services – Language Experience.
Where we are now?
- Japanese: Already available – Live as of Jan 11th, 2018.
- Brazilian-Portuguese: Already available – Live as of March 5th, 2018.
- Chinese (Simplified): Already available – Live as of October 11th 2019.
- Spanish: Already available – Live as of October 7th 2019.
- French: Already available – Live as of October 23rd, 2019.
- Italian: Already available – Live as of December 02nd, 2019.
- Russian and Korean: Already available – Live as of December 16th, 2019.
- German: Already available – Live as of March 13th, 2020.
- From German to English: Already available – Live as of May 25th, 2020.
See here a nice clip about this feature.
What’s next?
- Execute strong communication plan exploring the existing channels (SAP Support Portal, SAP Community, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to announce this new feature to SAP Customers, Partners and Employees.
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 senteces simpler, but does not understand/translate the technical tems 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 testes 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