Organizations can yield a veritable gold mine of insights and opportunities from their Big Data streams, but what happens when their text-based data comes in a mish-mash of foreign languages? For companies that operate on an international level, there’s no doubt that opportunities increase exponentially as the data flows in from all corners of the globe, but with that opportunity comes complex new challenges.

Big Data on a global scale represents a Big Language Problem, and with no easy solutions much of that ‘foreign’ data goes to waste.

Even so, these difficulties are well worth overcoming. With almost 175 million new tweets composed each day, and as many as 300,000 Facebook status updates every sixty seconds, Big Data is amassing at an unprecedented scale – and with just one fifth of all internet users being native English speakers, there’s a clear need for a multilingual Big Data solution.

Big Data Reaches Beyond Borders

In order to address one of Big Data’s emerging problems, SDL has launched its new BeGlobal machine translation software solution. A component of SDL’s Language Platform, BeGlobal integrates machine translation with text data analytics to enable real-time translation of web content, social media communications and other text-based data.

BeGlobal employs a very basic approach – translating multilingual data into a single, universal language – in most cases, English – before processing and analysing this data to gain insights. Once translated, all of that previously undecipherable foreign data can be processed using any number of search, predictive analysis and sentiment analysis tools offered by SDL.

BeGlobal can be integrated into existing Big Data systems via an open API, offering translation through a scalable SaaS model that features HTTPS and other protocols for encryption and secure ID, says SDL.

“With the growth in global business and the accessibility of online information, we now have a much greater need to access and analyze data from multiple languages,” said Jean-Francois Damais, Deputy Managing Director, Loyalty Global Clients Solutions at Ipsos.

“As a company focused on innovation and dedicated to our clients’ successes, we deployed SDL BeGlobal machine translation to further improve our research insights and bring new value to our customers.”

We’ve yet to try BeGlobal ourselves or hear from any other company that’s integrated this solution, so we’re not in a position to say how effective it might be. As anyone who has used Google Translate will testify – machine translations are often littered with errors, but for the most part they still do a reasonable job of ‘getting the jist of things’. If BeGlobal can do the same, SDL could well be the perfect fit for companies looking to exploit their Big Data on an international level.