Can I auto translate my website?
18th October 2022
I have recently read an article about a lady whose child got sick while in a foreign country. The small child unexpectedly started having a fever seizure. She took the child to the hospital and the doctor used an online translator to let her know that her child was going to be OK. But “your child is having a seizure” accidentally came up in her mother tongue as “your child is dead.”
Whilst using a machine translator to translate your website is a lot safer than using it in a hospital, the quality of translation can be just as poor. With rising costs everyone is trying to take shortcuts, but are they worth it?
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of using machine translation to translate your website.
The advantages of using machine translation for your website
- Cheap: tools start at as little as $100 per year for basic MT software.
- Fast: MT tools provide almost instant translations.
- Scale: capable of handling large amounts of content very quickly.
- Flexible: one tool can translate content into multiple languages.
The disadvantages of using machine translation for your website
- Poor quality: even the best machine translation tools don’t compare to the quality produced by professional translators. The translation quality depends on the input language’s complexity and the distance between the source and target languages, which the MT tool struggles to grasp.
- Grammar: grammar is a challenge for MT tools, especially for languages with a complex grammar system.
- Word-for-word translation: despite improvements, machine translation remains mostly a word-for-word translation.
- Context: the context influences the meaning of the text and is a key to efficient translation. Not something machine algorithms deal with well.
- Nuance: algorithms struggle to determine and replicate the nuances of human language.
- Legal implications: as more countries regulate the internet with privacy and data security laws, good translations are incredibly important. If you publish a bad translation of your online policies, you might be violating the law.
- Threat to damaging the business’s name: machine translations are largely inaccurate and full of grammatical and spelling errors which will make your look unprofessional and put your customers off.
Even with recent improvements, the quality of MT output is still miles behind the capabilities of professional translators. Hiring an expert team to translate and localise your website content is the best way to improve your chances of conversions and growth. Professional translators can adapt to the type of work required. This could vary from a simple translation to a more comprehensive translation with localisation, making your content sensitive to the cultural nuances, idiomatic expressions and the industry jargon of your target markets, while still being linguistically accurate.
