The Pitfalls of Online Translator

Often times a translator will give you the exact equivalent of the words written as opposed to giving you a more conversational and accepted sentence.  This can result in French that sounds broken or foolish.  The reality is, while online translator can be helpful, it’s never as helpful as human translation.

When you need to have your articles, documents, website or any other information translated into another language, you do have a choice – to have them translated with an automated online translation service, or to hire a human translator.

The first option, of course, is much easier and cheaper.  You can find lots of free and paid translation services for almost all the languages of the world.  You can get any type of document translated in mere seconds, whenever you need.    Some services even offer translation on the fly; your webpage gets translated as it gets generated, and lots of web masters use this feature for translating their websites to attract more traffic. But, personally I believe that this not the best way to get visitors to your site.  It annoys me when I search the web but when opening the site I find the text is difficult to read and comprehend.

Why is the quality of such translation so poor?  Language is a very complex system combining vocabulary, grammar, context, logics, style and lots of other nuances in both source and target languages, and machine technology simply cannot take into account all those factors.  It can’t analyze context and choose which word meaning suits best.  They can’t define proper grammatical structures, which results in literal, word-by-word translation.  But still, they are able to give the general idea of what the text is about.  You can use it for translation of websites, emails, and other texts for personal use only.  Providing this type of translation to your customers will diminish your chances of doing business at a professional level. Your documents or correspondence will not convey the meaning intended to their language.

Although automated translation technology is constantly improving, it is not yet able to replace human translation, and it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Hiring professional translators is expensive, the translation process itself is much slower, but only they can ensure that you get quality text that is identical to your source document; noncomplex, with style and grammatically correct, conveying the same idea that is expressed in the source language.  So, if you need proper translation, if you want to show to your partners, customers and readers that you are a serious and professional businessman/businesswoman, there’s no other choice than to refer to professional human translation.

About the Author

Carmen Outridge is a French English translator for the Quebec market. She has been translating documents for over 20 years and understands the importance of the dialect in Quebec to their people. More information can be found at www.outridgetranslation.com