You might think that the ubiquity of machine translation these days, Google Translate and Microsoft Translator for example, means there’s no need for our services. After all, computer translators are free and quick — you put your text in, choose your language, press “enter” and out pops your text. What could be better?
Well – quite a lot in practice as many organisations have found to their cost. Ikea, for example, operating all over the world, decided to make all its flatpack instructions leaflets pictorial to avoid any language traps. (You know the ones, guaranteed to cause marital disharmony and recourse to the bottle). In this fabulously funny video a YouTuber puts English text to the pictures and then runs the text through a computer translator. The results are hilarious, but also worrying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3rXCLdg3C0
The video neatly and cleverly sums up the key issue — that there is no human performing quality control on your Google or Microsoft translation, so you have no real idea of the accuracy or otherwise of the end result. Perhaps you want to translate your company’s website? Or some instructions about how to operate say, machinery. Or send a letter of agreement to a supplier abroad? Get it wrong and you could easily end up trashing your company’s reputation, losing customers and being subject to law suits.
It turns out that the advantages of machine translation aren’t quite so advantageous after all. Quick, free and easy doesn’t mean much if it’s wrong. So save your blushes and get it right. Here at Accutranslate we only use native speakers and we double check everything so that you can be assured that what you want to say is definitely said. Accurate in every sense of the word. Give us a call now on 0800 466 1335 or email us at info@accutranslate.co.uk