Do I need professional translation? The risks for your business of trusting machine translation or turning to your relative who once lived abroad

Did you ever wonder why your business would need a translator? Here you will find a brief background of how translators can enhance your business internationalization process, thus maximizing the probability of approaching and reaching new international markets. Even the oldest civilizations were in need of translators when expanding their cultures and interacting and doing business with other cultures. Do you still believe that your entrepreneurial quest abroad might be successful without a translator’s language consulting?

They say that translation might be one of the biggest turning points in history of the world, since the need to converge with other cultures has always been there from ancient times. Nevertheless, a really curious fact is that the visibility of translators has not been relevant until relatively recently. Before this, companies used to venture into their international journeys with the assistance of “people who knew languages” in order to adapt and localize their products or services; most of them are people from other nationalities or maybe friends and relatives who lived abroad for a certain period of time and had some knowledge of some foreign languages.

Thankfully (both for translators and for companies), globalization knocked at everyone’s doors and, as a result of the development of more complex international necessities, several businesses decided to hire the services offered by translators and, together with the growing trend of universities around the world of including Translation Studies in their academic courses, the profession became apparently more visible. However, the fast-paced development of machine translation (MT) and the growing flow of people moving across the globe make companies break their international barriers more easily and sometimes they eventually dismiss the added value that human, high-quality translations can provide to their business.

Therefore, do these factors suppose a serious menace for the perpetuity of translators in the future? From the point of view of translators, the answer is really simple, since most of them are totally convinced that they will be irreplaceable, and here we present some of the reasons why most entrepreneurs should be in need of translation services for their business now and in the future:

What can a translator provide to my business that any normal language speaker can’t?

Although at first glance this may sound contradictory (even though people are becoming more aware of the role of translators and interpreters), translators are not just people who speak several foreign languages fluently or know all the existing vocabulary of certain languages (that is why dictionaries still exist nowadays, apart from filling empty spaces in your bookshelves). Translators are professional linguists with expert language proficiency in at least two languages, capable to reflect the same meaning of a source text in one language into a target text written in another language. In other words, they are highly-skilled language professionals able to transform one text into another language preserving the same meaning and making it sound as natural as a text in its original language.

And that is precisely one of the main facts differentiating professional translators from normal language speakers: they are able to capture all the nuances that a written or oral text implies and print it into another language. Many times these small nuances get a bit tricky and businesses need to be aware that even the slightest details may result in terrible consequences for them. After all, as it is often said, the devil is in the details. As Bruno Portela rightfully mentions in a previous article, there are many cases and suburban legends of many leading business giants that failed to achieve their expected success in other areas all over the globe, due to inappropriate marketing campaigns or catastrophic international relationships that could have been improved with good translations. Now, picture these cases affecting your own business. The answer seems crystal-clear to me: Oh, calamity…

Nowadays, more companies are entrusting their international needs to professional translators and, as expected, quality translations make companies grow internationally and the results are more than satisfactory.

“The future of translators is finished; machine translation will easily replace them and overrule the industry”, Human VS Technology, the endless debate

There would not be enough people in the world to count all the times I’ve heard this. Maybe some people would be wondering: “And why not using machine translation? It’s free of charge and I can translate anything in dozens of languages in just half a second!” What I can personally advice to people ruling a business that think like this would be just “don’t let yourselves get carried away by expectations”. Imagine how terrible the outcome would be if any business would trust a contextless machine translation tool with their corporate information.

Yeah, machine translation is such an incredible invention, right? Nobody would deny that they are amazing tools and, as time goes by, they will develop into more accurate translation tools in several language combinations. However, despite the fact that a machine will hardly ever fully understand and interact with communication contexts and all their hidden details as a human does, guess who feeds machine translation tools in order to improve their complex linguistic algorithms? Yes, as every other remarkable cases related to technology, machine translation is not an exception and also needs humans (specifically, translators and linguists) to improve their outcome.

Is this a reciprocal need? Do translators need technology as much as technology needs them?

Of course, knowing the several in and outs of languages would not be enough, don’t forget that translators are not human dictionaries or anything of the sort; they are, above all, common people and erring is also a human feature. Nonetheless, they actually use linguistic resources on a daily basis; and not only dictionaries, but they also use and create specialized glossaries, virtual translation memories and computer-assisted translation tools (also referred as CAT tools within the industry).

This fact must not be seen as a reason for disregarding the translators’ task, but quite the contrary, as these resources are used in order to guarantee the best outcome and a quicker performance of their job. In fact, almost every translator make use of these sorts of software and computer resources and they are duly implemented as one of the main parts of their academic and professional training, since they are ultimately designed to assist translators on their tasks, just as their name states.

With all this, next time you try to figure out what your business needs in order to perform a successful international strategy to expand your services or products abroad, the answer becomes self-evident: you’d better call a translator.

Curious how quality translations could help your organization reach new international customers? Get an instant quote at Lingfy.com or drop us a line at hi@lingfy.com