With various free translation sites such as Google Translate, Yahoo translate, Bing and many others, many are turning to these services online when it comes to translation. While we can all agree that it is readily available and not to mention, free, however, we strongly believe that one should not be too dependent on such sites.
“Why not? Almost all the languages are there. I can just key in the sentences I want to translate.” While there is no denying that it is easy and you get your ‘translated’ texts within seconds, there is one thing that separates human and machine translation.
The factor of understanding the copy would be the main thing why we choose human translators as opposed to machine translators. Humans are able to interpret and understand the meaning of a text much better than a machine. Not all sentences are direct and sometimes creativity is needed to translate the sentences correctly which a machine is not able to do so.
The same thing applies for copywriting. Especially in copywriting where a lot of creativity is involved since it is mostly for advertising purposes, a machine translation would simply not work. As machine translation provides only the basic and most direct translation, the real meaning of a copy will be lost. This leads to confusion in the message and could ultimately be a recipe for disaster for any company.
Website translation sites can be useful if you need to translate a word or two or a simple phrase but certainly not for long copies that require deeper understanding of context.
What’s your take on this?