Automatic Translation of SAP Texts: How to Stay in Control with i18n Translation Manager for SAP S/4HANA

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:58:49 +0200

In many SAP rollouts we are currently facing the same question: Can we automate translation?

For a long time, the answer from many translation professionals was straightforward: don’t do it. SAP texts are often short, and stripped of context, and sometimes heavily abbreviated. Automatic translation of such fragments can easily produce misleading or incorrect results. A two-word label on a UI may represent a specific business action in an SAP process that machine translation engines rarely know about, and they will often get it wrong.

But despite these limitations, more and more companies are choosing to go down the automatic translation road.

Why Are Companies Turning to Automatic Translation?

The reasons are usually practical rather than ideological.

In many projects, translation takes place right before User Acceptance Testing. At that point, the project timeline is confirmed and the teams are focused on getting systems ready for testing. There is little bandwidth to set up and manage a full translation workflow.

We often encounter the following situations:

Tight UAT deadlines: translations need to be in place before testing can begin.
In-house translation: companies hesitate to send texts to an external translation provider.
Subject matter experts unavailable: those who are supposed to validate terminology are tied up elsewhere.
Missing language skills: sometimes no internal reviewer is available for certain languages.

This is when automatic translation becomes attractive, simply because it is fast and available. Tools like SAP Translation Hub or DeepL can generate translations for thousands of texts in minutes.

However, until recently there was a major drawback.

The Risk: Automatic Translation Creates Facts on the Ground

Once translations are written into the system and transported, they become part of the landscape. Undoing them later can be surprisingly difficult.

If testers or users do not like the generated translations, options are usually limited:

correct them manually, one by one,
repeat the translation process, or
live with possibly incorrect terminology.

In other words, automatic translation often means committing to the result before knowing whether it meets quality standards.

Before Automation: Define What Actually Needs Translation

Before running thousands of texts through an automatic translation engine, one step should come first: defining the translation scope.

SAP systems contain large numbers of texts, far more than you will need to translate. These may include technical descriptions, unused Customizing entries, legacy developments or other texts that will never be displayed to end users.

Scoping is the process of identifying which objects and texts are relevant for translation. In practice, this often means narrowing it down to specific applications, transport requests, packages, roles, apps, and transactions that will be used in the target language.

This is also important when using automatic translation. If you translate everything, you may end up generating thousands of translations that nobody needs.

Scoping ensures that the automatic translation process focuses on the texts that are really relevant and avoids creating unnecessary translation artifacts in the system.

Extract of a Scoping Summary Page that LUDECKE typically delivers to customers as part of the scoping process. Shows texts used by transactions vs. texts not used in the rollout.

Automatic Translation in i18n Translation Manager

In the latest version of our i18n Translation Manager for SAP S/4HANA, we introduced automatic translation features that integrate with SAP Translation Hub and DeepL. This allows translation managers to generate translations automatically in all SAP-supported languages directly from within the tool. They can either leverage SAP’s translation history and machine translation engine or route the texts through DeepL.

We see this feature as a pragmatic option rather than a replacement for human translation. For many projects, a human-reviewed translation workflow will remain the preferred approach.

But there are situations where speed matters more than perfection. Automatic translation is designed for exactly those scenarios.

The real innovation, however, is not the translation itself.

Selecting Automatic Translation from within i18n Translation Manager. Already approved translations (green status) won’t be sent for automatic translation.

Making Automatic Translations Reversible

One of the most important new features in the current version is the concept of correction projects.

Correction Projects can be created from a finalized Standard Project with just a few clicks.

Correction projects act as an “undo” mechanism for translation changes. After shipping translations to a test system, the corresponding project can be copied to either adjust individual texts or completely revert the translation state.

You can select which state the correction projects should be based on.

This changes the dynamic of automatic translation significantly. Instead of committing to the generated texts, you can now treat machine translation as a controlled experiment:

Generate translations automatically.
Ship them to the test system.
Let testers evaluate them directly on the UI.
Adjust or roll back translations if needed.

With this approach, translation validation mostly happens directly on actual user interfaces.

The Texts Behind the Object

Another improvement in the new version of i18n Translation Manager addresses a long-standing limitation in translation management – visibility.

Translation managers often work with objects and metadata, but what they really want to see are the texts themselves. The new Text Display functionality allows users to directly view all texts within a translation project. They can search by source text, filter by object type, and drill down into objects to see their actual text content.

Filtering for individual texts or displaying all texts of a subproject is easy.

This is particularly helpful when reviewing automatically generated translations. Instead of navigating through multiple tools, translation managers can quickly check how texts were translated across the project.

Preview: Editing Translations Directly in the Tool

In the next version, we plan to take this capability one step further.

Currently, correcting a translation in an SAP system usually means switching to SE63, a very complex transaction which requires additional training to use correctly. For teams that only occasionally work on translations, this can be quite challenging.

The next version of i18n Translation Manager is planned to allow users to edit translations directly within the tool while reviewing texts. This reduces friction and enables lightweight correction workflows without leaving the application. Combined with correction projects, this will make it much easier to refine or replace automatically generated translations.

Displaying texts in a project

A Changing Translation Landscape

Automatic translation in SAP environments is not new, but its role is evolving. What used to be considered a risky shortcut is increasingly becoming part of a broader translation strategy, especially for early testing phases or large-scale rollouts.

The key change is not the technology itself, but the ability to manage and control its results. With automatic translation, rollback options, and improved visibility of texts, organizations can now move faster without locking themselves in.

And that may ultimately be the most important development – automatic translation is no longer a one-way decision.

Read more on i18n Translation Manager…

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