How aiku translates product texts
Where machine translations come from
A product or family made from the master arrives with its name, description title, description and extra description translated into your shop's language. Family texts are translated again when the master changes them, if your shop follows the master for families. A product text you have already saved yourself is never overwritten by a translation.
On the edit page of a product or family, each of these fields shows the master's English text above your shop's text. A person icon next to the text means someone has already reviewed it. The language icon on the right, Get translation from AI, asks for a fresh translation of the master text into the box; nothing is saved until you save the form.
To redo the whole page at once, click Translate all from master at the top of the edit page. It translates again, from the master, every name and description on the page that nobody has reviewed, and saves them straight away, still unreviewed, so the stars appear under each one for you to read, rate and fix. Texts with the person icon, and family texts a person has ever saved, are left exactly as they are. The button only appears in shops that are not in English, on products and families that come from a master.
What the translator is told
Before every product text, the translator receives a short brief:
- It is writing for shops in your market. Natural wording and the product words local customers use and search for, not word for word.
- Brand and range names stay in English. Ancient Witch, Ancient Wisdom, Agnes + Cat, Greenman Rituals, Green Man, Pocket Pod and the other brands in aiku are never translated. If a range name keeps getting translated, ask for it to be added to the list.
- The rest of the family. When a product is translated, the translator sees how the other products of the same family are already named in your shop, the ones a person reviewed first, so one family does not end up with three names for the same thing.
- Recent corrections. The last corrections webmasters made in your language are shown to the translator as examples.
Rating and correcting a translation
Under a name or description that nobody has reviewed yet, the edit page shows How good is this machine translation? with five stars. Click the stars that fit: five if you would publish it as it is, one if it is unusable. The rating is saved straight away.
Then fix the text and save as usual. aiku keeps the English text, the machine's version, your version and your stars together. Recent corrections are shown to the translator as examples, so the same mistake should stop coming back in your language.
Only the first rewrite of a machine text counts as a correction. Once you have saved a text it is yours, the person icon appears, and later edits to it are not treated as fixing the machine.
Variant options
Products sold as a variant show a picker on the website, for example Choose Plug with UK Plug, EU Plug and None. Those option groups and options come from the master in English, so aiku translates them into your shop's language too: when a variant is created and whenever its options change, only the names that have no translation yet.
To check or fix them, open the variant and click Edit. Under Option names on the website each English name sits next to the name your customers see. Change any of them and save; the website shows the new name straight away. A box left empty shows the English name. Your names are never overwritten by the translator. The field is not shown in shops in English.
What it does not fix
The translator is still a machine. It can pick the wrong sense of a word, for example "charcoal" the colour instead of charcoal for incense, and it knows nothing about your customers that is not written down. Read new texts before they matter, and rate them: the stars are how we see which languages and which kinds of text need more work.