SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Google describes an epiphany as a moment of sudden and great revelation or realisation. It is typically seen as a positive thing, but what if it threatened the entire basis of your company?
All-in Global chairman Roy Pedersen was wrestling with such an epiphany before embracing the new future for his company, a combination of artificial intelligence and human editing which he defines as the revolution of iGaming localisation.
Writing exclusively for SBC News, he explains that witnessing how quickly All-in Global’s neural translation engines learned to produce high quality output completely changed his mind about using artificial intelligence when translating iGaming content.
These days I feel a bit like one of the uninformed men in this funny Norwegian commercial about Zalo (a dish soap) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPiqGiI-TNY.
You see a woman standing in front of a board of directors some time in the 1980s, presenting her theory that “all Norwegian homes will have a dishwasher in the future”. The board bursts out in laughter, mocking how unlikely her proposed scenario sounds.
Fast forward to 2017 when All-in Global made two videos where we translated the lyrics of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face and Three Lions’ Football Coming Home with Google translate to show how far-fetched it was to use machine translation for iGaming content.
Shortly after this, the intelligence of translation machines accelerated rapidly due to the development of neural engines and it wasn’t long until I faced one of the most difficult business decisions of my life.
It became evident that this technology was here to stay, and that companies who failed to adopt it would fall behind.
So we started feeding our engines with more than 13 years of translation data which was almost exclusively related to gaming, sports betting and esports, to see if they could accurately translate the complex terminology of these sectors.
I was involved in the testing of the English to Norwegian engine. When I saw the first output I immediately realised that ‘Pandora’s box’ had been opened and would be impossible to shut.
This was a difficult epiphany for me to embrace. I had spent the last decade building a company based on the lack of creativity and textual flow in translated iGaming content.
The mission of the translation service we provided was that it should “sound” like it was written rather than translated. I had to see with my own eyes that a machine could do that, and that’s exactly what I did.
So what about the unique pool of more than 300 human translators we have gathered throughout the years, all with a deep understanding of gaming terminology? What about the 640,000 professional translators around the world who specialise in other subjects?
Will they become redundant? Far from it. The amount of online content being written and translated, and the number of internet users, are growing at incredible rates.
Humans are still very much needed for post-editing – the biggest difference is that they can translate much more content in a shorter amount of time thanks to AI – paving the way for cost-efficiency at a completely new level.
Welcome to the revolution of iGaming localisation!
