Would you trust machine translation?
Many people, especially companies who are more keen than ever to save money, consider machine translation as an alternative to paid-for translations. There are many programs and online services available, so at first glance, this is a viable option. However, how realistic is this?
To start with, here are a couple of points. At the one end of the scale, most machine translation programs can handle “Happy Birthday” or”Hello, how are you?”. (Although even this should not be taken for granted.) At the other end, there is not yet, nor will there ever be, a machine translation program that can translate the operating manual for the Space Shuttle. So, what about the texts in between?
One simple headline from the sport section today – “David Beckham said he will accept Fabio Capello’s decision with grace if not picked to go to South Africa.” This is not fantastically complicated, but the three machine translation tools used came up with three very different versions. All three had various faults ranging from the comical (David Beckham said that she will…. Google Translate) to the simply wrong (Google Translate also referred to Beckham accepting it with good grace if he was not given a lift to South Africa.)
However, most companies will have significantly more to translate. To test this I pasted the three subsequent paragraphs into each website. (All texts I’ve used, and the resulting translations into German can be downloaded as a PDF here) The first difficulty is that three short paragraphs is more than the permitted length for some tools (Reverso) which means that texts must be very short. The second is that I have deliberately chosen an article from the sport section because they are the easiest to understand. Even then, all three programs used struggled badly. A German native speaker with a good understanding of English might understand the overall text, but it would otherwise be unusable.
So, you might expect me to say that you should always use a professional translator, and keep use of machine translation to a minimum, but it is actually true – there is no substitute for a trained linguist well-versed in his vocation.
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