When companies rely on this type of machine translation, the shortcuts become painfully obvious to readers of the final product. Machines are unable to accurately convey or understand all the nuances involved with a localization project.

The practice of maintaining a multinational marketing message and ensuring the feel of the original language is kept the same takes a high degree of knowledge and skill that can only come (at least for the moment) from human involvement. How do we compete with something that’s perceived as being free? I can talk about how much time, effort and money are required to get the original English document right, so surely when approaching the translation aspect, at least some respect should be paid to the quality of language used, especially when the originator may not be able to read the results. Over the years I’ve lost quite a few projects to people translating legal contracts, user guides, websites and most recently, translating food packaging, with Google Translate.

Do you just have one big computer who does all the translation?.

Do you use Google Translate for all your translation?.

Why should I pay you anything when I can get Google Translate to do it for free?.

So basically you do the same as Google Translate?.

It’s surprising (to me, at least) how many times I hear things like I’m answering it here on the language blog, to share with anyone who may be guilty of having the same thoughts. But I guess if you don’t work in the language industry, you might perceive Google as a trustworthy company who can do no wrong, so you could be forgiven for thinking that their machine translation would be equally reliable. If I’m honest, it annoyed me that I should have to answer it at all.

Call in french google translate