Chatvertaling

Chatvertaling is the practice of translating text exchanged in chat conversations from one language to another, typically in real time or near real time. It is used to enable multilingual communication in messaging apps, customer support platforms, team collaboration tools, and social networks.

Implementation usually occurs in the client, server, or via intermediary services. The most common approach uses machine translation, especially neural machine translation (NMT), trained on large bilingual datasets. Real-time chat translation must balance speed and accuracy, and may include language detection, automatic formatting preservation, and user-selectable target languages.

Applications include enabling international customer service, facilitating collaboration among multilingual teams, and supporting content moderation or community management across language groups.

Challenges include variable translation quality across language pairs, domain sensitivity (legal, medical, technical language), tone and nuances such as humor or sarcasm, and privacy concerns when chat data is processed by external servers. On-device or privacy-preserving translation methods aim to address these issues.

Future trends involve improvements in low-resource languages, context-aware translations using dialogue history, on-device models to reduce data exposure, and multimodal translation that incorporates voice and images alongside text.