We’re delighted to announce that as of today, all customers can use the Silktide platform in any of the following languages.
- English (US)
- English (UK)
- Spanish
- German
- French
- Canadian French
- Italian
- Norwegian (Bokmål)
- Swedish
- Danish
- Dutch
- Finnish
- Japanese
You can access these languages inside your account, by clicking on your user menu, and clicking Settings. Or you can ask your Silktide contact to update the default language for your whole account.
A radical new approach to translation
It is usually considered best practice not to translate your software too early, as doing so slows down product development. After translation, every feature you release requires more testing, translation, and cost.
This wasn’t acceptable to us. Silktide is still in the early phase of our product vision. So we needed a way to support more languages without development being slowed down.
To do this, we pioneered the use of a new AI-augmented translation framework.
By leveraging the power of modern LLMs (Large Language Models), Silktide has been able to automate the production of high quality translations. We can release new features, and have AI-generated translations immediately available at launch, without introducing any delays.
Crucially though, we still keep humans in the loop. Our staff and our community can review and improve our translations in real time – without even needing to deploy a new release of our software.
How this is revolutionary
Traditional machine translations are poor. Normally, relying on automated translation would result in an unacceptably poor experience.
But with LLMs, machine translation has advanced dramatically. A key part of our new design was to embed our translatable text with context, such as “The following text is for buttons. Buttons should be short, and be expressed consistently.”
With context, we are able to dramatically improve how well both AI and humans can translate without a laborious back-and-forth testing process. Previous AI had no capacity to do this.
We’re also able to use AI to double-check the output of the AI. For example, we can feed screenshots of our application into a vision-based model, and have it assess whether the text makes sense in context.
The future
These languages are just the start of what Silktide will eventually support. With our new technology, we’re able to add more languages more easily than is normally considered possible.
We have a lot more planned for Silktide this year, including many new applications of AI, so stay tuned.
