How it works
Smartling's Adobe Illustrator Plugin offers an Instant Translation option that allows you to quickly generate translations without creating a translation job or waiting for content to move through a traditional workflow. This approach is ideal when MT or LLM-generated translations without human review are sufficient. However, this option is less suitable for highly creative or high-visibility content, as there is no human editing or review.
Instant Translation is available as part of the standard submission flow with the Adobe Illustrator Plugin.
When submitting content from Adobe Illustrator for translation, select the content you want to translate. In the Submit Translation dialog, you can then choose the Instant translation option.
How to use Instant Translation with the Adobe Illustrator Plugin
Step 1: Install the Smartling plugin
If you do not already have the Smartling plugin for Adobe Creative Cloud installed, follow the steps in the Adobe Illustrator Plugin Setup article. It is strongly recommended to create a dedicated Files project in Smartling (if one does not already exist for your team).
Please note that you must have access to Smartling as an Account Owner, Project Manager, or Requester in order to use the Smartling plugin.
Step 2: Configure the preferred Profile in Smartling
Instant translations are completed using Smartling's MT API. To configure your preferred MT or LLM translation provider and settings, log into your Smartling account (requires Account Owner or Project Manager user role).
- From the top navigation of your Smartling dashboard, access the AI Hub.
- In the Instant MT section, select the MT API tab.
- Here, enable Machine Translation for the Adobe Illustrator Plugin.*
Warning: *Note that any changes made in the MT API tab will affect all integrations using Smartling's MT API.
- Under Default Profile, choose your preferred MT Profile or LLM Profile.
- If needed, language-specific Profiles can be configured.
- Optionally, glossary terms can be inserted in machine translations.
Once enabled, Instant Translation with the preferred Profile can now be used with the Adobe Illustrator Plugin.
Step 3: Requesting content for translation
The process for requesting instant translations is largely the same as the standard translation submission flow.
The only difference compared to the creation of a regular translation job is that, in the Submit Translation dialog, you select the Instant translation option instead of adding the content to an existing job or creating a new job.
After selecting the target languages, click Submit.
Step 4: Receiving translations
After you click Submit, the content gets translated with the selected MT or LLM Profile. In most cases, the translations are ready almost instantly.
A separate translated file is created for each target language, within the same folder that contains the source file. The target locale is appended to the page name to indicate the translated version, for example: File1 [German (Germany)].
For additional resources, please refer to the Adobe Illustrator Plugin documentation.