On Thursday, Dow Jones Newswires launched a new AI language service in French, allowing readers to access automated translations of breaking financial and investment news in real time. The new service is expected to produce “fluent” translations of between 500 and 1,000 stories each day on the wire, according to Dow Jones.
The French service is just the latest expansion of the company’s AI-powered translations, following the launch of similar services for both Korean and Japanese late last year.
“It gives us an ability to very quickly, almost instantaneously, translate our very rich existing English-language content into a language that will attract other audiences,” Chip Cummins, chief Newswires editor at the Wall Street Journal, told me. Cummins said those audiences include professionals “who prefer to read their business news in their native language or who are suddenly tapping into the U.S. market as a place where they want to invest, or their clients are investing.”
Dow Jones Newswires offers financial news on global markets, commodities, central banks, and politics, including original reporting and analysis from The Wall Street Journal. Its reporting is often fed directly into trading terminals, at times competing with financial newswires from Bloomberg and Reuters. Its readers are often using this reporting to make fast-paced, high-stakes decisions about where to move their money. This makes the new services a pressure test of sorts for AI-powered translation — or machine translation, as it is more commonly known — in newsrooms.
Currently, off-the-shelf machine translation products fall far short of guaranteeing 100% accuracy. Even products that integrate more sophisticated generative AI models continue to stumble in translation tasks, particularly in languages that have less available training data. Still, some news publications have opted to integrate Google Translate directly into their article pages or have taken a “good enough” approach to adoption in order to expand their reach.
Dow Jones took a few notable steps to try and improve the overall performance of its machine translations. First, Newswires’ product team built the Japanese, Korean, and French services to be model agnostic. That has allowed them to, at times, switch the foundation model they are using based on evolving performance in each language. More significantly, though, the team conducted rigorous testing and fine-tuning with human translators and editors to lower error rates and improve fluency.
“Most of our language services have a link to the English translation but that doesn’t excuse us of errors,” said Cummins, explaining why they chose to undergo a several-months-long “quality assurance” process. “We strive for the same sort of accuracy that we would get at the English-language service.”
Before the launch of the French service, for example, Dow Jones leaned on external professional translators — native speakers of French — to review samples of its automated article translations. This review focused on fluency and was managed by the product team. A second layer of review was then conducted in-house by French-speaking journalists knowledgeable about financial jargon and the language of markets. This was led by the newsroom and involved bringing on dedicated “quality assurance editors.”
Errors spotted by both of these teams were flagged and corrections were fed back into the model to slowly improve its performance.
Dow Jones also already had language services for Japanese, Chinese, and German with dedicated teams of human translators who had been producing translations, on a time delay, for years. These teams had built out extensive glossaries and style guides as a resource for their manual translations. These glossaries and style guides were also fed into Dow Jones’ machine translation models to further customize them. For Korean and French, similar glossaries were produced, in part, by using generative AI.
“We were looking at both accuracy and fluency, and looking at how to get both of those numbers lower and lower and lower,” said Cummins. He did not share any specifics on the current French performance rates, but said his team was only comfortable launching once it was close to the correction rates for its English content.
Still, to ensure that readers stay aware of the potential for errors, disclaimers are placed on most machine-translated articles. Each disclaimer states that the article was automatically translated “by artificial-intelligence technology” and that “the English-language version should be considered the authoritative version.”
After launch, the newsroom’s quality assurance editors have reviewed translations regularly. “We are not reviewing every single story that goes out. But we continue to do those spot checks, for Korean and French, which are brand new services,” said Cummins.
Considering Dow Jones has existing teams of human translators on staff, the pivot to AI prompts questions about labor displacement. In other industries like subtitling and book publishing, machine translation has already been criticized for taking work away from human translators.
There were no human translators for French or Korean on staff before the launch of those respective AI services, according to Cummins. In December 2024, though, Dow Jones announced a partnership with Yomiuri Shinbun, a Japanese legacy newspaper with the largest circulation in the country. The launch of a co-branded news service, and the accompanying rollout of machine translations for Japanese, did displace parts of the existing Japanese translation team. Cummins emphasized that a segment of that team — though not all of the translators — were moved into new “quality assurance” and “prompt engineering” roles.
As the new French service goes live, Cummins hopes the product will be a chance to court new customers, including financial firms in France, French professionals in financial hubs like New York and London, and French-speaking customers in Canada who may be impacted by U.S. tariffs.
Looking ahead, Dow Jones has already started experimenting with integrating AI into its German language service, while eyeing an expansion into entirely new languages. Cummins says they have already hired quality assurance editors for two additional languages that have yet to be announced.
Screenshot of Dow Jones Newswire’s French language service portal, courtesy of Dow Jones.