What do you like best about the product?

To preface - I think Unbabel as a company and a product has the best of intentions, and would probably work well for a large majority of use cases. Its support translation tool (integrated into Zendesk ticketing) is second to none, and works almost flawlessly, delivering pretty solid translations quickly - our agents had no trouble adjusting to using it and incorporating it into our standard workflows. The concept of varying "pipelines" of translation quality, dependent on cost, it a good one also - and it is very clearly outlined as to how it works when you onboard. The customised portal that Unbabel offers is a reasonable manner of tracking workflow, although could be improved.

On an implementation level, the team you are assigned is incredibly friendly and are (in most cases) very responsive and able to solve issues that arise along the way. Weekly syncs are useful and where they are not available to support, their own support team is there offering technical expertise promptly and effectively.

What do you dislike about the product?

We were sold on the idea that Unbabel's full-PEMT pipeline (their highest quality AI-assisted option) would deliver near indistinguishable levels of quality from full human translation - this used in combination with their Zendesk Guide integration for our Help Centre. Our content was very technical, and unfortunately in use it turned out that their model was not capable of handling the complexity of the writing. Even though a significant amount of it went via human translators, the context as to our product, the terminology and things such as gendering (in German, for example) - were not able to be communicated and delivered effectively.

In addition, their Zendesk Guide integration was poor and lacked a number of very simple features - such as bulk article selection & accurate translation statuses.

Although there is so much focus on AI nowadays, there are simply some areas that AI cannot match a human for - and complex translation (even in better trained model languages such as French & German) is one of those aspects.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Unbabel was supposed to help both with our support team translations (on tickets) and simultaneously with our Help Centre (FAQ article) content translations. The former worked very well, the latter, not so well. We have eventually determined that we cannot proceed with Unbabel beyond the first year due to the latter issue.