Find out the truth about free online machine translations
(available on many of our competitor's sites)...

When we put two simple sentences through a competitor’s online machine translator to translate from Spanish to English, this is what it produced:

“I write east email to you for informarte of which your teacher Spanish already is recovered and she has been gotten up to the school. If you wish to take deprived classes, please ponte in contact.” [Spanish to English machine translation]

Heidi Fulford, owner of translate4me explains the pitfalls of working with machine translation

"Its all too true that our knowledge of foreign languages often lets us down - but could businesses be shaming themselves by using free machine translations offered on various websites and search engines?

As owner of translate4me, a pioneering language vendor in the UK & USA I have evidence to show that companies are making a laughing-stock of themselves thanks to our dependence on computer translation websites - especially if it’s in the business arena.

Translation programs have been around for many years, and are designed to be useful for finding individual words; for example, you are going to Spain and need to know essential words such as - 'beer' & 'please!'

But some businesses are using them as a cost-cutting exercise to translate their literature - with disastrous results.

The programs simply cannot understand English phraseology, and their translations often come out as gobbledygook.

To test the theory, translate4me staff translated some simple business phrases into French, German, Italian and Spanish using 5 different free online machine translation programs.

Using a safety guide on installing a child’s car seat for a well known retailer we fed the English text into the machine translation and the translated results were alarming.

For example, the English text:

”Many people leave the purchase of a child car seat far too late.  It’s not a decision to be made when mum’s already in labour,” came back in a variety of weird ways, but the best was the German:

”A child seat for the car is only bought by many in all last minute.  The decision should be made; however, not only if with mummy, already stopped themselves a blowing.”

While we laugh at this, imagine the disastrous consequences this retailer could have faced if they’d relied on machine translations for their overseas customers?

Quite simply firms could be losing vital business by relying on this process.  In some cases, the programs could even cause fatal results such as when they are used for health & safety or medical information. 

While translate4me embrace certain translation software such as translation memory (which remembers previously translated text and results in faster turnaround times & increased client savings), I am absolutely horrified at the thought of businesses using machine translations for translating their documentation. When it comes to translation, machine translations are only 60% accurate.   Machine translations produce at best a literal translation and nothing more! 

Here at translate4me we use professional, qualified native-speaking translators translating into their specialist field and it is only by working in this way that companies can be assured of a top quality & accurate translation every time.  Unlike machine translation our human translation pays attention to style, tone and foreign market suitability, something that can never be replicated through software, however sophisticated.

translate4me translates in over 100 languages and we are crusading to educate companies of the pitfalls of machine translation.

My conclusions:

Any company that uses these sites as a cheap fix for their translations are making fools of themselves in front of their overseas customers and are extremely unlikely to win any business as a result.

Machine translations simply provide a literal translation which, when you consider the complexities of languages, is bound to fail.

While software can be used to faciliate the localization process it cannot replace human translators!"

translate4me is a language service provider providing clients all over the world with an accurate, reliable & responsive language service in all languages.

We do NOT use machine translations, instead we rely on our 3000 native speaking professional translators!