Why Professional Translation Is Better Than Machine Translation

Technology has created a great deal of products meant to make the lives of humans easier and better. For the most part, this is true. Telephones have created a way to communicate over long distances. Computers are able to create documents in a faster more efficient manner. Cars, airplanes, and other transportation methods allow people to travel longer distances in a shorter amount of time. This has led to many people working in cities where the pay is much better than in suburbs. Although technology has definitely made life much easier, it is important that humans do not rely on technology 100% of the time.

Machine translation is one example where individuals should not rely exclusively on technology. Machine translation is the use of a computer program to translate a document. The computer software can translate into many different languages.

Professional translation is available, but some companies use machine translation because it is much cheaper. Professional translation is offered by many different companies and may take either one day or several days depending on the length of the document. A computer program can translate a document within several minutes.

Although it seems machine translation may be the preferred translation method, professional translation is a wiser choice. Professional translation services are much more accurate. Accuracy is a huge problem companies encounter when machine translation is used. The reason for this is that a computer program takes each word in the document and translates it into a word from the other language. Unfortunately, not every word in all languages has an equivalent word. Therefore, the computer software may arbitrarily pick another word or sometimes omits the word entirely. This method does not produce an accurately translated document. In fact, the document will have several errors within the context.

Professional translation services use a human translator who has experience in the language. Therefore, this person has firsthand knowledge about words which cannot be translated and can manually translate the sentence while preserving the document’s message.
Another reason professional translation services are preferred is that every language is created based on a culture. A computer may select words that translate accurately, but the result may be words used in an inappropriate context. Human translators are quite familiar with the culture of words from a language and can avoid this error.

Professional translation services may cost a bit more than a computer program, but a company is guaranteed that the message of the document will be maintained.

By: Haytham Amro

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About the author: Haytham Amro is the General Manager of Aldiwan.com. It is a UAE based company that provides high quality translations and other services to fill the multi-lingual financial, legal, scientific, engineering, medical and business needs of many large international businesses and individuals. For moreinformation please visit our website at: www.aldiwan.com/