Sports translation: how do you translate live commentary in real-time?

For sports betting firms, one of the most challenging day-to-day tasks is providing live commentary to their users. People want to know what’s going on in every moment of a sporting event – especially now that in-game bets are so widely taken during live events.

This is hard enough in one language, let alone when you have multiple languages to provide commentary for. So how do sports betting brands manage sports translation to translate live commentary in real-time and keep users around the world informed?

The live voice approach to sports translation

If your source commentary is speech (as opposed to text, for example), then you’ll need live voice commentary, which works a lot like simultaneous interpreting, to translate things for you. If your aim is to convert voice commentary in one language into voice commentary in another language, then this is all you need.

However, most online sports betting brands need text commentary in some form, even if it’s in addition to voice. So this calls for some voice to text transcription to be added into the sports translation mix.

The bums on seats approach

One common approach for betting firms is to hire people in each city where events are taking place and get them to attend, so they can watch live and provide the commentary as things develop. This is especially common for football where it’s easy for spectators to get a decent view of the match at all times.

There’s a lot to like about this approach, too, but there are a number of downsides to it. First of all, it’s a pretty expensive way to go about sports translation. Aside from paying the commentators for their time, you also have to cater for each ticket and aim to get native speakers in each language you target or have translators at the ready.

There’s also the question of quality to think about. Hiring a bunch of random people to attend matches, guarantee they’ll turn up, not drink beforehand and provide reliable commentary for the entire event isn’t exactly the ideal process for quality control.

The subtitle approach

A lot of betting sites only need text commentary and the translation process can work out much easier in these cases. If you’re starting with source commentary in text format you can use subtitle translation to cater for each language. This, in most cases, is the simplest sports translation process online sports betting companies have – but even this isn’t always fast enough for the frantic pace of live sports.

The machine and human approach

When you need the absolute fastest sports translation process for live commentary, we combine advanced machine translation software and human translators to find the sweet spot between speed and accuracy. Our own i plus platform stores each piece of translated commentary for future use, making the process faster each time around.

Over time, you’ll find the same (or very similar) pieces of commentary being repeated across multiple events and we’re able to automate this repetition into almost instant, accurate translations. Meanwhile, our human translators are there to make sure the highest quality is there in every translation.

Okay, so we’ve run through a number of approaches today, at the risk of making sports translation sound intimidating. However, this isn’t the case if you have a flexible, experienced team powering your sports translation efforts – so get in touch with us if you need to find out the best approach to sports translation for your brand.