Leveraging AI Translation Tools in AEM: Example using DeepL
Leveraging AI Translation Tools in AEM: Example using DeepL?
Introduction
AI-powered translation has undergone significant improvements over the past few years. What once produced awkward, literal results has evolved into language output that is often remarkably fluent and context-aware. For many use cases, modern AI translations are already close to perfect.
Still, close to perfect is not the same as ready to publish. Brand tone, domain-specific wording, legal nuances, and SEO considerations mean that manual review is still required before publication. The real breakthrough of AI translation is therefore not full automation, but the speed gains. Modern AI translation tools enable teams to generate high-quality drafts in seconds instead of days, shifting human effort from translation to review and refinement.
For Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) projects, especially large multi-language enterprise websites, this change has a massive impact as it can save significant time.
Key points
Why AI Translation in AEM
AI translation quality has improved enough to reliably generate near-publishable drafts. In Adobe Experience Manager, the main benefit is speed: translations that once took days can now be produced in seconds, allowing authors to focus on review, tone, and accuracy rather than manual translation work.
Leveraging AEM’s Built-in Translation Rules
Instead of custom logic per component, the approach reuses AEM’s existing Translation Rules configuration as the single source of truth. By traversing the content tree and matching properties marked as translatable, all relevant text, including deeply nested component data, can be extracted consistently and in a scalable way.
Translating Content with DeepL
The extracted content is sent in one request to DeepL, using structured XML to preserve formatting and distinguish between translatable and non-translatable data. This keeps translations fast, predictable, and accurate, with full control over how text and HTML are handled.
Writing Translations Back into AEM
Translated content is mapped back to its original JCR paths and properties using metadata embedded in the XML. From an author’s perspective, pages are translated and saved almost instantly, ready for review without manual copy-paste or external tools.
Live Copies and Inheritance Handling
For Live Copy setups, inheritance must be cancelled after translation to prevent future rollouts from overwriting localized content. This is handled at component or property level, ensuring translations remain stable while still allowing structural updates from the source.
Overall Impact
The result is a lightweight, API-driven translation workflow that scales well for large, multilingual AEM sites. AI does not replace editors, but it significantly reduces cost and time-to-market by removing translation friction and letting humans focus on what adds the most value.
Full Article
Read the full article on https://meticulous.digital/blog/f/leveraging-ai-translation-tools-in-aem-example-using-deepl to find out more. Note that it includes code samples on how to implement it.
Q&A
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