You might use an app-based translation service like Google Translate to check a word or two in another language occasionally. That’s fine going about your daily business. But you need to use professional translation services for foreign language communications, documentation and website for business purposes.
The sheer volume of text involved in online and offline business communication makes it impossible to think about manual translation using an app. However, in addition to the volume challenge there’s also the inaccuracy of app-based services to seriously consider.
Services such as Google Translate provide what’s known as literal translation. The Dictionary describes this as “taking words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or exaggeration”.
If you know the slightest thing about languages, you’ll be well aware that there’s no such thing as word for word translation from one language to another.
Professional translation services eradicate the risk of any verbatim translation errors in your communications and documentation. But there’s still more to it, because professional translation services are provided by people, not machines, artificial intelligence or algorithms.
In his ‘The Shallowness of Google Translate’ piece Pulitzer Prize–winning author and scholar Douglas Hofstadter justifies his misgivings about app-based translation:-
“From my point of view, there is no fundamental reason that machines could not, in principle, someday think; be creative, funny, nostalgic, excited, frightened, ecstatic, resigned, hopeful, and, as a corollary, able to translate admirably between languages. There’s no fundamental reason that machines might not someday succeed smashingly in translating jokes, puns, screenplays, novels, poems, and, of course, essays like this one. But all that will come about only when machines are as filled with ideas, emotions, and experiences as human beings are. And that’s not around the corner. Indeed, I believe it is still extremely far away.”
At Accutranslate, we provide professional translation services by native speaking experts across a spectrum of business sectors and languages. It’s our job to ensure that not a single word, phrase or sentence representing your business sounds wrong.
Please don’t hesitate to get in touch in you need professional translation services in European, Asian or less broadly used languages. We’ll have a quote to you in just two working days or less.
Source
The Shallowness of Google Translate by Douglas Hofstadter, The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/