Google translate.

Why should I hire a translator when I can get Google Translate to do it for free? Sadly, this is not an uncommon question.  A few self-explanatory images available on the web would suffice to answer, but here is a more technical explanation of the dangers of using Google Translate.

1. Google Translate is not 100% accurate. Google Translate will look for appropriate translations by searching for linguistic patterns within millions of documents already translated by human translators. However, if it has insufficient data, it can only guess based on what it does have, which can often be misleading or simply wrong.
2. Google Translate produces unnatural translations. Even when it manages to produce grammatical sentences, they often are too literal and, as a consequence, sound awkward or funny to a native speaker of the target language.
3. Google Translate doesn’t offer a quality check on its translations. As a result, users have no means to know whether the translation in the target language is good or not and they end up presenting weird translations to the public like the ones in the pictures above. These may manage to get a smile out of us, but the consequences of mistranslation can sometimes be quite serious. Let’s take the translation of food packaging as an example. If the translation of the ingredients on a package is not 100% accurate, it can cause severe problems for people with allergies or restrictive diets.

In conclusion, language is just too complex for machines to understand all the grammar, context and nuances; Google Translate could never replace the work of a professional human translator.

 

Here at LingoStar, we guarantee professionalism and we always deliver proofread and accurate translations by experienced human translators. We can provide language services in over 100 languages into/from English. Call us today or send us an email for a free quote!