Lost in Translation or Arrrghhh - Google Translate Does Not Cut It!
Say it with me ... out loud ... come on ... don't be shy:
Google Translator Does Not Cut It!
And again:
Google Translator Does Not Cut It!
Repeat until it becomes second nature to your brain:
Google Translator Does Not Cut It!
Seriously, I am in this business for ages and it seems to me I am spending an exorbitant amount of my time explaining to customers or innocent passersbys (the latters especially when I am frustrated like now) that Google Translate does not .. I repeat NOT cut it!
This holds still true for all the machine translation help that is out there. Sure, those are nice tools to help you unterstand the gist of contents from foreign languages sites you find interesting but be aware that even in this case translation software often enough turns a "do" into a "don't".
But by the love of all the Gods and Godesses above and below: Do NOT paste your precious content into Google Translate, press enter, publish the result on your sites and then call it a day!
Best case scenario you are responsible for readers keeling over and dying in multitudes because of sheer hilariousness of the machine translation. Worst case your intention to accomodate native speakers of other tongues backfires tremendously and will end in a loss of sales and to put insult to injury chip away at your hard earned reputation as an expert in your field.
My frustration will be your boon, I hope. Expect me to produce future posts on how to avoid this pitfall and how to take advantage of non-english speaking markets with translating your content the right way, after all: A translation is only a good translation if it can not be recognized as such.
Thanks for letting me vent a little:)
Toodles,
Petra
Recent Comments
2
Hi, I am not English and have the same problem. I am using Grammarly a lot but have to be cautious with them as sometimes they seem beside the track and I also use rewordify.com that I find very useful. The text I enter in rewordify is corrected by Grammarly and then click on rewordify text.
Maybe all this don't have anything to do with your problem but it helps me vent a little;)
Claude
Hi there,
Nice of you to drop me a line. I hope you don't mind me giving you the same answer I gave Donnie - I am still a little piqued so the answer is lengthy, mind:) My problem is that I am a professional translator from English into German and I am a little bit frustrated about the time I have to spend to fix problems for my customers who for example used machine software for sensible translations - like manuals for appliances or some such only to be held responsible for false and potentially dangerous guidance in the target language because no translation software to date can accurately discern subject matter or appropriate grammatical structures or etiquettes or double meanings or false friends and the list goes on and on and on. A story of a caterpillar turning into a butterly is transformed in German into a building equipment that turns into a butterfly. A "do not do this" turns into "do exactly this" because of a wrong grammatical structure. A polite sentence in English translated by a software can turn the sentence into an insult. This can cost you quite a bit of money.
Rolls Royce found out the hard way. Years ago they spent a few hundred thousand dollars to promote a new grey lacquered liimousin. The called it "Mist". Sounds good in Engliah, does it not? Grey, silent, mysterious, elegant ... to bad it turns out that "Mist" in German is what comes out of the rear end of a cow.
Use translation software to your hearts content but never be under the impression that the result is up to par.
Toodles,
Petra