Grab’s Help Centre articles are now available in Chinese, thanks to machine translation

Grab Support Tech Team

. February 9, 2024

Some 130 million Chinese tourists are expected to travel overseas this year, representing one of the largest visitor groups to countries like Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. We’ve found that these tourists are increasingly relying on services on our superapp during their visit, which is why we want to make Grab as accessible as possible for them.

The interface of the app itself is already available in multiple languages, including Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. GrabFood menus across some cities in Southeast Asia can be translated from local languages (e.g. Vietnamese, Thai) into English and Chinese.

But more recently, we developed a solution to reliably translate Grab’s Help Centre articles into Chinese and other languages, using an AI-based machine translation model. The Grab Help Centre houses thousands of articles that address frequently asked questions and provide users with easy-to-grasp self-help solutions.

Since we launched the Chinese language version in November last year, we’ve seen a healthy demand for our new Chinese-language articles. This gives us confidence that our users, whether travellers from overseas or local Chinese speakers, appreciate being able to access our Help Centre in a language they are comfortable with.This eliminates potential language barriers for a more user-friendly experience on our app.

AI translation solution

Hiring a human-powered translation service for this task would have taken up to a hundred days to complete, at a steep per-word cost. The consumer Help Centre’s database contains around 4,500 English articles.

So we needed some AI support. After testing and experimenting with local teams, we came up with a solution that combined various off-the-shelf large language model (LLM) solutions to translate the Help Centre articles.

Within a few weeks, we were able to roll out a cost-effective translation solution that reduced translation processing time for a language pair from 100 days to five days.

We rely on user feedback to monitor the accuracy of our machine-translated articles through an upvote/downvote system.

A downvote due to “inaccurate translation” gives us a point of reference for future corrections. As of now, only a small percentage of Chinese Help Centre downvotes were related to translation quality, which reflects the accuracy of the machine-translated articles.

How the translation solution works

To see the translation solution at work, visit the Grab Help Centre (see below). A pop-up window will confirm your preferred language before you access the Help Centre.

Users who select Chinese will get access to the translated Help Centre content.

At present, we’re collaborating with different country teams to generate AI translation solutions in even more languages. We’ll continuously improve our ability to meet the needs of diverse travellers.