Lilt Combines Human Translators With AI for Enterprise Grade Accuracy
Lilt builds a machine translation platform that keeps human translators in the loop to ensure high-quality results for complex documents. The company claims its hybrid approach increases translator speed by up to five times compared to traditional methods.
Lilt takes a unique approach to machine translation by keeping human translators at the core of its platform rather than trying to replace them. While standard automated translation tools provide passable results for simple tasks like reading menus, they often fail to capture the nuance and accuracy required for professional or legal documents. By recognizing that machines alone are not sufficient for high-stakes translations, Lilt creates a system where artificial intelligence supports human expertise instead of substituting it.
Co-founder and CEO Spence Green develops this hybrid model after experiencing severe language barriers while conducting graduate work in the Middle East. He realizes that critical information, such as legal texts, voting materials, and equipment manuals, remains inaccessible when only poorly translated by machines. Collaborating with John DeNero, Green discovers that machine learning works best not as a standalone translator, but as an interactive tool that assists human professionals by lightening their cognitive load.
The Lilt platform actively suggests translations for upcoming sentences and paragraphs, giving human translators a reliable reference for structure, tense, and idiom. Translators consult these AI-generated suggestions and use them to accelerate their workflow without sacrificing quality. By seamlessly blending the speed of automation with the critical thinking of a human professional, Lilt claims its system boosts translator productivity by five times.