Free online translation services are readily available and may seem like a fast and cheap way of meeting your company’s translation requirements; however they should be used with caution.
The first attempts to mechanise the act of translation occurred in the 1930s, yet it wasn’t until the 1970s when research intensified and technological capabilities had evolved that fully automated translation began to develop to an extent where it was of any real value. The evolution of the World Wide Web means that free automated translation is now easily accessible for the general public and although it has its uses in very specific circumstances, its capabilities are still very limited and therefore in the wrong hands the results can be disastrous.
We are frequently approached by clients who have used, or are thinking of using free online translation tools. Some are looking for a proofreading service prior to publishing their material, others are in the unfortunate position of having had their automatically translated document published and have received negative feedback. From experience in both of these situations it often takes longer and costs more to edit the automatically translated document than to translate the source document again from scratch. What’s more, translators are often reluctant to edit translations completed by free online translation tools as this turns out to be a notoriously time consuming process.
Really there are only a few circumstances where fully automated translation can be used successfully in isolation without the intervention of a human translator. If you are trying to gain a very general understanding of a foreign language document in your native language, or in circumstances where a rough translation containing errors and lacking style is acceptable then free online translation tools can be quite effective. Similarly if the content of the input text is sufficiently restricted in its range of vocabulary and structure then automated translation can be useful for translating into various languages quickly, however even then the resulting translations may lack style and accuracy.
Unlike the human translator the computer considers each lexical unit in isolation without taking the context into account. The meaning or value of a word can differ dramatically depending upon the surrounding lexical units and the machine is often unable to select the most appropriate translation. There may also be information that is not expressed in the language of the source text such as gender or level of formality but which is required in the target language. At present, machine translation cannot ask questions in the way a human translator can. This is why using free online translation to translate out of your native language is extremely risky as you have little or no idea as to whether the tool has correctly interpreted the content. From experience, even with the shortest of phrases you may encounter problems with fully automated translation as the computer is effectively guessing the context in which the word occurs and offering a suggested meaning based on an assumption. Recently we were asked to review translations of the two words ‘fitting room’ in the sense of a ‘changing room’ in a clothes shop into various languages. Unfortunately the online translation tool used had misinterpreted the meaning in almost all the languages and translated it as “a suitable room”!
So although free online translation tools are rapidly evolving and improving, at the moment they have limited capabilities and should really be avoided for the production of official or publishable documents. If machine translation is used then the skills of a human translator will almost certainly be called upon at some stage if a high quality translation is to be produced.
