Communities living inside a territory constitute a set of ideas, beliefs, traditions, language, and moral values that connect them. These aspects motivate and drive the interaction of people with each other and with those around them. However, if communities want to interact with people living outside their territories, they need efficient translations to understand each other. But when we say ‘understand’, it naturally means to keep intact the prevalent cultural references and nuances of that community.
You may get the word-to-word translation, but there’s a high probability that the intended meaning might get lost in translation. Hence, you need to take assistance from professional translation services that can ensure this does not happen. For instance, if you have an e-commerce business and you want to expand it into other markets with an entirely different cultural base from yours, taking help from website localization services would be recommended.
How Machine Translation Functions?
With the advent of technology, the translation industry has incorporated machine translations to make their functions more efficient. So what it does is that it automatically starts to convert the original or the source text into the language of your choice. So if you want document translation services, the machines would simply replace words in your document and replace them with translated words.
However, machine translation cannot function alone. It needs some assistance. For it to produce good translated content, you need to feed complete phrases and their nearest replacement words into the system. Hence, it is recommended to use machine translation, only when you have to translate a generic text. Otherwise, translating scientific or researched-based text would not produce a quality product.
Merits of Machine Translation
- One of the biggest advantages of machine translation is its ability to deliver swift results. This reduces the turnaround time and hence saves a lot of money and resources.
- Moreover, if you use machine translation you will not have to worry about arranging translators and then dedicating an entire department to manage them as well. It’s a machine, hence its purpose has always been to reduce human efforts. And that is what it’s going to do.
- Another merit of machine translation is that it helps you to translate large amounts of information in a very short period of time. On the other hand, if you take help from professional translators, they’ll probably charge you a lot of money for the same amount of work. Hence, ist very cost-effective as well.
- If you are able to translate documents vis-a-vis document translation services, they’ll give you an entire schedule for the amount of time and resources it will take to get the job done. It may be a good setup, but it will probably take more time to get your product ready for the target market. Hence, you might fall short in the competition. Whereas, machine translations will ensure that your time-to-market is considerably reduced.
Cons of Machine Translation
- One of the biggest disadvantages of machine translations is that it is not able to keep intact the cultural references and nuances of the target market, so even if the delivery is swift and efficient, the intended meaning might get lost during translations.
- Such errors can increase the level of ambiguity in the translate texts. So, the customers might not understand what you are trying to say.
- Moreover, if you are looking to translate important confidential text that holds great significance to your organization, then using free machine translation software like Google translate, will not be a good thing.
- Moreover, you need uninterrupted internet services to utilize machine translation software’s. Hence, your maintenance cost might increase as well.
- Machine translation might produce inaccurate translated content. These machines are unable to fathom the context of the given texts, hence may produce an output lacking the intended message. Hence, defeating the entire purpose of the translation.
- The repercussions of an inaccurately translated work might cost you more than you can bear. It may potentially ruin the image of your organization. And denigrate your brand valuations, causing companies to avoid doing business with you. Hence, it’s better to take help from renowned website localization services, rather than gambling your company’s reputation on a machine.
Conclusion
One thing we can ascertain after reviewing the above article is that no matter how efficient a machine gets, it still cannot function properly without the assistance of human beings.
You have to understand one thing here, machines are mediators between individuals. Their job is to assist and make things more efficient. The work done by softwares is to benefit other individuals, not machines. Translations are needed for people to communicate with each other and not for the machines to understand each other. Hence, you can never extract the human factor from its functions. No matter how accurate a machine simulation gets, it can never keep intact the emotions, and contextual meaning of words, mainly because it’s not made for that purpose.
Therefore, machine translation is definitely beneficial for organizations. One should utilize its plus points, but only within the capacity that it entails. The other factor, such as cultural references, or human emotions, should be dealt with only by professional human translators with solid experiences and linguistic expertise.