When you have a letter to translate for work, want to produce your CV in a different language, or have any other translation need, it is tempting to save money and ‘do it yourself online’. Is this a good idea?
NO! It is true that with advances in technology, computer translations are getting better and better. However, if you experiment, you will soon see that you can end up with rubbish, or an amusing, if inaccurate answer. A good test would be to translate a phrase into one language, then back into the original again. In one such test, the phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’ came back as ‘invisible idiot’. I could mention many more!
Problems usually occur when there is more than one meaning for a word – for example in English the word ‘right’ can be ‘opposite of left’ or you can have the ‘right to do something’, etc. This of course works in all languages. The German word ‘Mutter’ can mean ‘mother’ or ‘a nut’ (as in nuts and bolts). The Danish word ‘gift’ can mean ‘married’ or ‘poison’. Unless a computer can spot the correct meaning, it will almost always translate incorrectly, producing interesting results!
On an engineering document which had been put through machine translation, there appeared the phrase ‘water ram’. Engineers later worked out it must be referring to a hydraulic ram!
There are also rumours about an occasion in which the French sentence “Nous avons besoin de la sagesse normande” was translated as “We need Norman Wisdom”…..
Machines don’t understand grammar and semantics, never mind idiom and style and anything else you simply understand as a native speaker of a language. Instead of producing an article in Dutch, you are more likely to end up with Double Dutch!
You may think it is a cost-cutting exercise, but it is false economy. A German tourist board made the decision to use computers rather than humans, and the result was that 7500 brochures had to be binned because they made no sense at all.
So by all means have some fun with online translation tools, but when it comes to your business, do the right thing and talk to those of us who know what we are doing!