Dow Jones Newswires Launches AI-Powered French Language Service—Backed by Humans

Dow Jones Newswires launched an AI-powered French language service, backed by human editors. 

It follows the implementation of Korean and Japanese translations, which use a combination of advanced AI models across various language pairs to deliver real-time, relevant financial insights to investors around the globe. Dow Jones declined to share the names of the AI models they are using. The service is designed to deliver 500 to 1,000 financial news stories per day from Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, translated from English into French in real-time.

The service is tailored to help wealth managers, institutional investors and online trading platforms better serve their French-speaking employees and clients, providing timely updates on global markets including equities, bonds, FX, commodities, macroeconomics, central banks and politics. The service uses metadata to enable personalized content delivery by asset class, company, region or topic, enhancing client engagement and supporting smarter, faster decisions.

This process is equipped with built-in guardrails and controls, including disclaimers and links to original English sources, upholding Dow Jones’s reputation for quality, transparency and accuracy. 

The new process has dramatically changed the scale and speed of translating a 500-word article, which used to take hours and now happens in seconds, Chip Cummins, chief newswires editor told AMO. 

“This acceleration not only drives significant time and cost efficiencies but also allows us to be far more responsive to market needs. Crucially, we maintain rigorous editorial oversight to ensure the quality and reliability our clients expect, particularly with sensitive financial information,” Cummins said. 

The role of human translators has shifted from manually handling every step to “becoming system architects and quality stewards, overseeing and fine-tuning the automated processes.”

“Journalists and editorial processes are the heart of what we do and make us the premiere partner for real-time financial and market news. We have leveraged AI to drive efficiencies but ultimately it’s about doing more, not saving more,” Cummins said. 

French was the third language chosen because of the strong demand and use cases seen. The next language will be Arabic as expansion in the Middle East is a key focus across the company, Cummins said. They are also looking at Spanish, Portuguese, German and more. 

“It really comes down to where we can add the most value, based on client needs and engagement,” Cummins said. 

The newswire service is something of an “internal incubator within the company, where we can develop and trial programs and products and then share those learnings and capabilities with the various newsrooms across Dow Jones, including The Wall Street Journal,” Dan Shar, executive vice president and general manager of Wealth & Investing at Dow Jones, told A Media Operator.

Among some of recent examples of testing:

Auto-summarization: Leveraging AI to create short summaries of the key points of articles, which has since been rolled out and is in use as a supporting article feature on The Wall Street Journal; Dow Jones is exploring other implications of this capability, including rolling it out on Barron’s and MarketWatch.

Auto-translation: Language translation efforts are already benefiting various programs across the company, including Chinese and Japanese editions of WSJ and Barron’s.

Key economic data and calendars managed and developed by Dow Jones Newswires now help power initiatives such as IPO calendars and other economic events at WSJ and MarketWatch.

Dow Jones Newswires GenAI Feed: Enables customers to integrate Dow Jones Newswires to sync marketing, moving news directly into their GenAI workflows.