Technical Brief: Overcoming the Challenges of Global Player Support with AI-Powered Translation and Human-in-the-loop Guidance
Overview
In an increasingly globalized gaming industry, real-time multilingual player support is no longer optional—it’s essential. Players expect seamless communication with support teams, yet language barriers often delay resolutions and lead to frustration.
To meet the demands of the current global market, making use of technologies such as machine translation (MT) and AI has become mandatory. However, tools powered by these technologies are not without their own challenges, particularly as relates to quality.
Side has worked for years to overcome the technical challenges associated with delivering high-quality AI-powered localization and translation, culminating in the release of our multilingual player support tool RESOLVE™ in 2023. This technical brief will explore some of the technologies used to power RESOLVE, including how it combines powerful monitoring algorithms with human post-editing and analysis to deliver more accurate, higher quality translations.
Bridging the Language Gap in Player Support
Imagine your favorite game crashing after a recent update or purchasing an exclusive in-game item only for it to disappear after checkout. The logical step is to contact player support, but what if the support team only speaks English while you speak Korean? A player will undoubtedly get frustrated, demand a refund, and maybe even write a bad review while uninstalling the game forever. This scenario plays out daily, with many support teams unequipped to handle global requests in real time.
Some of the most common challenges for delivering multilingual player support include:
• Language Barriers – Support teams usually only operate in a limited number of languages and time zones.
• Inconsistent Machine Translation Quality – Relying on publicly available Machine Translation (MT) engines such as Google Translate can be very inconsistent and offer poor quality. Different MT providers excel at different language pairs, adding to the confusion.
• Contextual Failures in AI Translation – Direct MT tools often misinterpret player requests or make the responses seem like obvious MT responses without nuance or care.
• Scalability and Cost – Relying on human translation for all languages can be costly and resource-intensive when considering coverage requirements for 24/7 player support.
Optimizing Machine Translation with Human Oversight
These challenges highlight the need for sophisticated solutions that can bridge these gaps effectively. At Side, we have been developing solutions to these issues with RESOLVE, our state-of-the-art real-time AI translation tool, designed specifically to provide accurate and contextually aware player support across any language pair worldwide.
Unlike standalone MT providers, RESOLVE dynamically selects and optimizes the best MT engine per language, ensuring top-tier accuracy while integrating seamlessly with existing support workflows. There are several key technologies making this possible inside RESOLVE:
• AI-Driven MT Provider Selection – Automatically selects the best MT provider per language pair based on language detection and continuous quality score monitoring.
• Continuous AI and Human Feedback Loop – AI-optimized translations enhanced by human post-editing, with human post-edits being added to a segment-based cache. Segment-based caching stores each sentence separately rather than the whole translation so that partial cache hits can be optimized and stored for later translations.
• Real-Time Translation and Caching – Faster resolution times with AI-assisted instant translations including segment-based cache matching.
• Continuous Quality Score Monitoring – Uses BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy n-gram similarity score), XLM-R MTE (Meta’s 100+ language dataset–based Machine Translation Evaluation), and other proprietary algorithms to continuously assess translation accuracy, feeding into MT provider selection.
• Seamless Integration – Fully integrates with leading customer support platforms (Zendesk, Salesforce, Helpshift, and more).
• Cost Optimization – Reduces human translation costs by requiring human post editing only for segments that are below automated quality thresholds.
Continuous Configuration: AI-Powered MT Meets Human Intelligence
While Machine Translation (MT) has been around for decades, recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to major breakthroughs in translation quality.
However, no single MT provider is perfect—each has strengths and weaknesses across different languages. To get the best out of recent AI-based MT solutions, each MT provider must be optimized based on its prompt, context, and glossary configurations. RESOLVE handles all of this on behalf of its users and clients with continuous optimizations.
Below is a breakdown of each step of the feedback loop:
1. Smart MT Provider Selection – Analyzes multiple providers (Google Translate, DeepL, Amazon Translate, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) to determine the best match for each language pair depending on the source-language detected and target-language desired.
2. MT Provider Optimizations – Each MT Provider is optimized for the Player Support function by providing high-quality translation glossaries. For LLM-based MT providers, each provider is coded with optimal LLM prompt writing, LLM context provisioning across the full conversation history, and other contextual information.
3. AI-Powered Translation Scoring – Monitors MT quality in real-time using advanced algorithms, including BLEU and XLM-R MTE scoring.
4. Human Scoring – Humans evaluate a sampling of each MT’s quality to validate the BLEU and XLM-R MTE scoring and provide insight into the tone and nuance of the translations.
5. Quality Threshold Automation – If MT quality is insufficient, RESOLVE automatically flags translations for human post-editing.
6. Human-In-The-Loop AI Refinement – Human corrections are fed back into the AI models and caching systems, improving future translations. Human corrections are evaluated based on Levenshtein Distance formulas to determine how large of an edit was necessary, further refining the quality.
7. Translation Caching and Learning – Stores high-quality translations for instant reuse, reducing costs and response times.
8. Continuous Evaluation – New models and MT providers are monitored whenever they are released, keeping the best solutions for each MT at the forefront of MT technology.
Beyond AI: When MT Fails, Human Expertise Takes Over
Even the best AI translations can sometimes miss the mark due to context loss, rare dialects, or nuanced expressions. RESOLVE intelligently detects low-quality MT output and automatically escalates translations to human experts—leveraging Side’s 15-country global presence for localized post-editing. This synergy between AI and human expertise combines the speed of AI with the quality assurance that comes with human oversight.
To manage costs effectively, RESOLVE also employs optimized cost control through flexible quality and cost thresholds. This ensures that translations remain accurate and contextually appropriate without unnecessarily increasing costs.
In summary: why use RESOLVE?
✔ Superior Translation Accuracy – AI-optimized translations and feedback loops that outperform generic MT providers.
✔ Fully Managed Optimization – AI-based and human-guided MT selection and optimization, fully managed by the RESOLVE team, so our partners don’t need to think about which tool to use—RESOLVE uses the best tool every time.
✔ Faster Player Support Response Times – Real-time AI-driven localization reduces delays and frustration and allows the player support team to react globally with just one team.
✔ Scalability for Global Growth – Seamlessly supports multi-language gaming communities all with one support team.
✔ Secure and Safe – Fully ISO 27001 certified and secured with industry-leading cyber-security tools. Data is always encrypted, at rest and in flight. Offering an optional fully isolated hosting option, as well as full role-based access control with multiple levels of access for managers, testers, translators, and more.
✔ Seamless Integration – Works with Zendesk, Salesforce, Helpshift, and other major support tools.
✔ Optimized for Gaming and Beyond – Built for game publishers, developers, and non-gaming industries alike.
Conclusion
With RESOLVE, Side is committed to addressing the challenges of multilingual player and customer support by combining the best AI translation technology with human expertise, side by side. As the gaming world continues to expand globally, real-time, accurate localization is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity.
Experience the power of AI-driven localization. Contact us today to learn more about RESOLVE.