Machine Translation vs. Human Translation - The Big Debate

So…you decided to take your business global and need to translate your marketing materials, website and technical documentation…where do you start?

Under no uncertain terms - DO NOT USE MACHINE TRANSLATION!

I know you are tempted because you don’t have the budget or the time and think simply copying and pasting into Babelfish or some other program from Google or Yahoo will do the trick.  Don’t be fooled. These programs will not do your material justice in the translated language. 

Translation is an art…one that many subject matter experts spend their entire lives mastering.  Just like English writers, whether creative or technical, they master their craft as they practice and by training - so do translators.  They are very good at understanding the contextual meaning of the source language and translating it into their native language.  As an example, have you ever taken a sentence and tried to rewrite that sentence in English to say the same thing only using entirely different words?  It is difficult, but translators do that every day into the target language. 

Don’t make a mistake and use a translation software that gets the context incorrect or that is not localized for the target market.  You do NOT want to jeopardize your entire business image just to save a few dollars.  I promise you the headaches are not worth it. 

Right now the software is just not sophisticated enough to do a decent job in translating meaning and context. In the future - that may change.  We will have to wait and see.