There are over 500 million people use Google Translate daily for a variety of purposes. It’s undeniably an effective tool, in plenty of cases, like for a tourist lost on the transportation of a foreign company, or for a student trying to decode a new subject.
There are plenty of possibilities, and in many cases, Google Translate is the tool for the job.
Until it’s not.
Let’s explore the cases where Google Translate might not be qualified to translate content related to your business.
How does Google Translate work?
Almost everyone can recall at least one time when Google made a very funny translation. These are all over the internet. But it makes one wonder, how a tool used by millions makes such a silly mistake, and what’s really going on behind one of the most commonly used Machine Translation tools.
It was launched in 2006, feeding on United Nations documents, and back then it was a statistical machine translation.
In 2016, it became a neural machine translation tool (NMT), which somehow made it better at translating sentences in context and providing relevant translation.
This allows it to model the relationships between words and phrases in different languages. It doesn’t just translate word-for-word; it looks at entire sentences to understand the context and meaning, aiming for more accurate translations.
It supports 243 languages, and although it utilizes NMT, and is still a work in progress.
Read more: Everything you need to know about Google Doc translation
Why google translate can be bad for your business
Lack of Human Touch
One of the major red flags in Google Translate is that sometimes it comes out as too robotic, word-for-word translation that lacks the cohesiveness inherent in human translation.
You’re more likely to come across this with complex text like literary excerpts, or slang, especially with new words, or industry-specific jargon that could be confusing for the tool.
I tried translating this from English to Arabic “CX is crucial in the hiring process”, and it didn’t understand the link between the word “hiring” and “CX”, interpreting it as customer experience, instead of Candidate Experience.
Inconsistent Quality Across Languages
Although it’s great the GT supports that many languages (243), there is a clear inconsistency in the quality of translation among them.
Some users could be very satisfied with English-Spanish translations, while others could report running into many grammatical and contextual issues with other translation pairs.
Translators who often use this tool point out how GT works surprisingly well with languages that have way fewer speakers than other major languages. In this discussion thread on Proz, professionals pointed out that GT gives good results with Finnish, and becomes notably annoying with German, French, and Spanish.
Breach of confidentiality
Although it’s a tool that’s so easy to use it’s very accessible but with this accessibility comes some drawbacks.
Especially when it comes to attempting to translate sensitive documents like financial, healthcare documents, or legal ones that contain valuable information about your company.
Why is that?
Because when you don’t sign an NDA with Google Translate that means you’re data is very vulnerable and it could be obtained by a third-party source or it could be leaked online.
Traditionally it’s safe to avoid Google Translate or any other translation tool that does not provide a level of security to your documents.
Lack of Contextual Accuracy
This one is not specific to Google Translate only but to most Machine Translation tools Except really advanced ones. When you put an excerpt without a clear context; there are words that could work in more than one context. This is where you could spot Spa contextual inaccuracy of Google Translate.
For instance, the English phrase “I’m feeling blue” means “I’m feeling sad.” However, if you input this phrase into Google Translate, it might give you “Estoy sintiendo azul,” which literally translates to “I am feeling blue” in Spanish, but this translation misses the idiomatic meaning of sadness.
The same with the Arabic translation, it’s interpreted as “I am feeling the color blue”.
Did you know that in 2015 Google Translate ran into a very interesting bug? whenever someone attempted to translate the “Russian Federation” it would give the word “Mordor” you know from the Lord of the Rings, And Translate the word Russian to occupier!
Does Not Understand Your Target Audience
It is also not customizable in the sense that you cannot really talk to it to tweak the language to address a certain group of people.
Most of the time it opts for a formal tone, which might not come in handy, especially if you are translating a piece of content that should have a funny effect on your audience on a social media channel.
Even more, there is some risk of receiving inaccurate translations that might offend/trigger your audience.
Let’s say you’re translating a social media post from your account that’s targeted to an American audience to another account that is targeted to a Chinese audience.
Although this might sound like a cost-effective way to recycle your social media content and spend less on translation, however, it could backfire because GT is not aware of the channel you’re posting this on or using this translation for.
Which brings us to another disadvantage
Can’t Create the Desired Tone
Unless you’re attempting to translate a very formal piece of content probably illegal or financial. The tone will most probably be in place. Yet, if you’re translating a meeting transcript, a webinar, social media content, or a blog post, the translation could be accurate but the tone will most likely be sacrificed.
You Will Still Need to Proofread
That being said, it’s really obvious that GT cannot stand alone by itself as a 360 translation tool.
You will need to either proofread it yourself to look for grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors which are very common especially if the language pairs are so far from each other, or use another trusted tool to do that for you.
In most cases, GT can be used beside other free online translation tools to get more accurate results.
And one fun way to play with it is to back-translate the outcome again into the source language. This is where you will spot its inaccuracies, and blind spots.
GT Errors can be avoided, for good!
Since GT apparently is not optimal for handling translation work for your business. It’s probably a good, if not a fantastic idea to let a translation service provider take the lead on that. That being said, Fast Trans team is among the leading translation and localization service providers who can handle that efficiently, and swiftly. Why?
- Our team comprises native experts because they know the target audience best.
- We have probably worked with your niche before, and know the ins and outs of it.
- More than 120 language support, we’re always ready to hire freelancers to work on a new project if it’s outside our language pair coverage.
- You get your work reviewed by many team members, and into multiple QA stages, to ensure maximum accuracy.
- A rock bottom price, and top-tier quality. Get your free quote here.
