Online or automated translation services can be very useful – if you’re looking for a single word, a common phrase or just the gist of meaning, for example.
But it is important to know how these programs work. They operate via a library of documents and patterns. When a translation is generated, the program looks for the pattern of words in documents that have already been translated by human translators. It then makes an intelligent guess as to what an appropriate translation should be. This process is called “statistical machine translation”.
Unsurprisingly, this process is prone to enormous error and there is no shortage of examples of often hilarious mistranslations – just put a foreign language news story into a machine translation and see what comes out. All nuance and subtletly is lost and sometimes much more.
If machine translation is used, it is extremely important to get it edited by a human who will ensure it is accurate, appropriate and sensible. In translation, particularly for your business, there is no substitute for a human, native speaker.
___________________________________________