Multilingual news publishing: Your next ROI booster is here!

Your markets and AI are already primed for delivering news in dozens of languages. It is now time to smartly adapt it. SENTHIL NATHAN gives an insight into the new paradigm shift which opens previously unimaginable doors for newsrooms in multilingual news publishing.

The arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) in your newsroom is no longer breaking news. AI has already had an impact on the news industry. Today’s news people are filled with both excitement and fear, but no one expects the arrow to reverse its course. Today, AI can assist you in discovering a newsworthy event, and robots have begun to file reports on the event.

Reports are copy-edited with AI writing tools, and final copies are read out on-screen by text-to-speech artificial voices by incredibly natural but machine generated faces. However, the story is not over yet.

AI translation & multilingual text generation

Many of us use Google Translate to translate text, and edit it before publishing. AI-powered machine translation can help you repurpose content in numerous languages and markets. For investors and professionals, it opens previously unimaginable doors.

However, machine translation in the newsroom is still in its infancy. AI technology like MT may provide you with magical solutions, but you can’t use it piecemeal. To effectively leverage AI capabilities, industrial and/or enterprise solutions are required.

To create multilingual content with AI, you need a strategy and an environment around it: You must first identify your target markets. If you publish in India, for example, you must serve at least ten language markets. If you publish globally, you must support from 5 to 50 languages, depending on your market plan. Consider 100+ languages if you want to be like Meta or Amazon Prime.

You’ll need translation technology and human translator as your business keeps expanding. Machine translation systems like Google Translate and text generating programmes like GPT-3 are examples of translation technologies. They are all to be integrated in a productivity environment that also contains modules for managing editorial content, assets (style guides and glossaries), assignments (both internal and external), and more. Additionally, the solution ought to be harmonised with your current wire services, CMS, or newsroom software. Workflows must be specific, and everything ought to be customisable.

Translation into over 100 languages

Once all of these things are in place, the magic begins:

• Your content can be translated into over 100 languages. Customers will do it if you do not, and you will lose the monetising opportunity.
• Your camera-person shoots an event. Transcription is done while recording. A ‘robot reporter’ writes a news story with a title, intro, highlights, images, and captions from a transcript. Your team receives pre-subtitled or VO feeds too. Multilingual, real-time.
• You burn the midnight oil writing an opinion; why not transform it into a multilingual podcast before you log off? Just a click away, your opinion is read out in your own voice.
• Do you need some backgrounder, or timeline? It can be automatically generated and turned into an explainer video or infographic. In all languages.
• You compose a lengthy piece. How about automatically producing a 100-word summary, a 20-word intro text, or a 5-word headline? We can do it.
• In the next Lok Sabha Elections in India, your reporters from rural districts in different states can send you hundreds of text, voice, and video inputs in their local languages; AI can gather, analyse, and transfer them into a single format (say, text) and primary language (you choose). Then you make it multilingual.

The technology may be intimidating, but the rewards are tremendous and tempting. What your newsroom requires is a perfect, flexible, affordable, and customisable multilingual content solution.

Ailaysa platform

One such solution is Ailaysa. AI translation platforms such as Ailaysa combine AI, humans (human editors), and industry workflows in a single stage, allowing you to maximise the potential of AI in a highly productive manner. It is a SaaS application that provides industry-specific solutions for a variety of industries, including the news sector.

Ailaysa has been developed by Langscape, one of India’s leading LSPs with two decades of experience, with its founders being people with extensive domain expertise in news and publishing. Langscape’s clients include many MNCs and corporations in India and abroad, including Microsoft, Hyundai, Bayer, Ola Cabs, Dailyhunt, Zoho, Freshworks, Lionbridge, RWS, Reverie, and Haptik.

Upgrade your newsroom, without breaking the bank. Ailaysa facilitates AI adoption. You can now become a multilingual and multimodal publisher.

(Senthil Nathan is CEO of Langscape Language Solutions Pvt Ltd, which launched AI translation platform, Ailaysa. He began his career in the news and book publishing industries. To contact him,

write to senthil.nathan@ailaysa.com or call at +91 9884155289)