我们如何通过成本效益提高翻译体验

As COVID restrictions were fully lifted in 2023, the number of tourists grew dramatically. People began to explore the world again, frequently using the Grab app to make bookings outside of their home country. However, we noticed that communication posed a challenge for some users. Despite our efforts to integrate an auto-translation feature in the booking chat, we received feedback about occasional missed or inaccurate translations. You can refer to this blog for a better understanding of Grab’s chat system.

随着2023年全面解除COVID限制，游客数量大幅增长。人们开始重新探索世界，经常使用Grab应用程序在自己的国家以外进行预订。然而，我们注意到对于一些用户来说，沟通是一个挑战。尽管我们努力在预订聊天中集成自动翻译功能，但我们收到了有关偶尔出现的遗漏或不准确翻译的反馈。您可以参考这篇博客以更好地了解Grab的聊天系统。

An example of a bad translation. The correct translation is: 'ok sir'.

一个糟糕的翻译示例。正确的翻译是：“好的先生”。

In an effort to enhance the user experience for travellers using the Grab app, we formed an engineering squad to tackle this problem. The objectives are as follows:

为了提升使用Grab应用的旅行者的用户体验，我们组建了一个工程小组来解决这个问题。目标如下：

• Ensure translation is provided when it’s needed.
• 确保在需要时提供翻译。
• Improve the quality of translation.
• 提高翻译质量。
• Maintain the cost of this service within a reasonable range.
• 将此服务的成本保持在合理范围内。

Ensure translation is provided when it’s needed

确保在需要时提供翻译

Originally, we relied on users’ device language settings to determine if translation is needed. For example, if both the passenger and driver’s language setting is set to English, translation is not needed. Interestingly, it turned out that the device language setting did not reliably indicate the language in which a user would send their messages. There were numerous cases where despite having their device language set to English, drivers sent messages in another language.

最初，我们依靠用户的设备语言设置来确定是否需要翻译。例如，如果乘客和司机的语言设置都设置为英语，则不需要翻译。有趣的是，设备语言设置并不能可靠地指示用户发送消息的语言。有许多情况下，尽管设备语言设置为英语，司机仍然用另一种语言发送消息。

Therefore, we needed to detect the language of user messages on the fly to make sure we trigger translation when it’s needed.

因此，我们需要实时检测用户消息的语言，以确保在需要时触发翻译。

Language detection

语言检测

Simple as it may seem, language detection is n...