In the summer of 2007, a group of reporters in Israel took a translation shortcut of sorts and visited an online computer language tool on a website to translate a message to be sent by email to the Dutch Consulate in the city of Tel Aviv. The document was purposed to have been about a conference on politics in the Netherlands, and to be addressed to the Dutch minister in person. Unfortunately, the message wasn’t even close; the final result was that the journalist asked the Dutch minister some strange and embarrassing questions about his mother.
So much for online translations.
It is clear that machine language services have restrictions; they can’t necessarily think and reason, neither can they positively perceive cohesion and flow of the words. They more or less can just do as good or as bad as the programmers designed them to do. In the above case, while we can positively blame the journalists for not seeking a correct translation for such an respected and important document, one has to consider that part of the accusation should also fall upon the poor and inferior programming of the website tool itself.
These online tools, i.e. Google’s Online Translator and Babelfish from Yahoo!, certainly are of a little assistance and have some advantages; every one has access to these online tools for small or zero cost, and they assist very good for personal projects or for single-word translations. More cutting-edge translation software such as Babylon and Systran are even more helpful in that they contain dictionaries and usual phrases, as well as grammar and verb usage extras for various countries’ languages.
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However, when it comes to a formal, accurate translation service, no one of these methods can quite compete with the human flair.
So why someone choose one approach over some other? The decision depends on the project itself. For a simple job, like a website translation, for example, many online translator services provide a good enough “gist”. Google’s on-board translator plug-in can automatically translate most websites you visit from Google’s search engine, in more than 54 languages. For private uses, maybe sending a letter to a loved one or a foreign friend overseas, the online language professional may also have use – as long as he or she has a good sense of humor.
Most professional linguists themselves use translation software to do their work, which might or might not be of use to you. Why pay someone else 0.00 just to use software you can possibly purchase for and use it yourself? Most translation software is also friendly to use an this time. In most programs, you simply load a document, and the translation software reads and re-writes it. There is hardly any human interaction whatsoever. While the professional translation software is intended to make the best “guess” of what the original text contained, there are some issues to be addressed.
For instance, translation software most likely will not understand cultural components, uncommon dialects or slang. Most if not all software packages just do not have the database extensibility in order to contain alternative versions and different dialects. The translation is word by word, so if any extra expressions, such as Singapore’s slang of placing “lah” at the end of some words, will be unreadable to the software.
Another disadvantage is creativity. Let’s face it; this is a machine. It doesn’t have emotion or voice; it can’t feel anything and it surely can’t express itself. When you’ re writing a letter to someone of a respectable importance, e.g. a legal advisor, the style must stay friendly and professional at all times. Automatic translators don’t catch this “mood”. Whatever you say in your original message is all that the software will catch. It won’t look for other words to use, neither will it propose you to alter the expression of the text. This can also be destructive to a novelist needing to translate his or her book to another language.
If you truly think to go with the human touch in your translations, it is surely the best alternative as far as readability and precision. If you have a Russian document, for instance, it would be a good thought to take it to someone who knows the Russian language or is Russian. There is neither software nor a computer needed in this case.
This way can of course be very expensive. This author found it needed some day to translate several legal documents in English that had to be translated to the Russian language fast. The cost to do so was 0.00, to translate about twenty pages. So while the human translation service can be a very good alternative when you need 100% accuracy, make sure you will in fact be dealing with humans before paying the money.
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