Swiss Life translates 50% more efficiently with Supertext’s AI translation

The multilingual text requirements of international companies pose a challenge for even the most well-equipped in-house language department. For example, the 12-person Language Services team at Swiss Life, which faces a 17% volume increase each year. The 10,000 Swiss employees of the country’s largest insurance company communicate internally and externally in several languages, and the company’s international business units are represented in over ten other countries. This results in countless translation tasks, and various external agencies support the language services department in handling the volume. Increasing productivity is the name of the game – and has resulted in a consolidated AI translation solution for language management.

AI should be strategically and sustainably integrated into the company’s own translation processes. It should reduce the internal workload and enable the language team to make better use of resources, while at the same time strengthening the team’s role as a centre of expertise and project management hub. Data protection is also critical for an insurance company of this size. The new solution therefore aims to help counter employees’ uncontrolled use of various online translation tools.

At the beginning of 2020, the language services department introduced Supertext’s AI translation solution to pretranslate texts into the company’s corporate languages: German, English, French and Italian. The roll-out began with selected users and text types, and was gradually expanded to 50% of all translation orders in the language services department after being directly integrated into the translation tools Trados Studio and Plunet.

The resulting impact on productivity is clear: internal analyses in the language services department at seven-month intervals have shown a significant time saving for all text types since the introduction of Supertext’s AI translation. A 30% increase in productivity was achieved across all tasks in the language services department, and the translation process is 50% more efficient than without the consolidated solution.

A change in strategy that paid off: the break-even point was reached in less than 12 months. The effective cost savings from using Supertext’s AI translation are in the six-figure range.

And AI translation doesn’t just help Swiss Life with quantity, but with quality as well: through customisation, AI translation continuously adapts to the company’s corporate language and industry-specific wording. Swiss Life can control this development itself and add more terminology to the corpus at any time. This goes hand in hand with data security that can be constantly monitored thanks to hosting on state-of-the-art Supertext servers and consistent encryption.

Swiss Life will continue to benefit from customised AI and its ongoing improvement in the long term, because continuous training with validated translations ensures that each order produces even more accurate results. It’s an investment in translation that has now paid off across the entire company: the online translator is available to the entire workforce, giving around 10,000 employees access to internal expertise. At the same time, the use of freely available online tools has been significantly reduced.