I’m all for saving money but with things, this important to the end consumer extra care really needs to be taken. One problem phrase can soon find itself making its way on to almost all of your translated information, partly driven by the bizarre trend of not charging for, or checking 101/ICEs matches provided by large agencies. They then get used to returning ICEs or 101% matches (depending on your Translation Engine of choice). The problem is made worse by adding incorrect terms, such as these, to a translation memory without the help of a terminologist. We now provide all of their language support. I took my translation team around a store in-country to see for themselves exactly what had happened. And they are if you want to legally sell your product in a French-speaking part of the world. Are nuts and walnuts different? They are if your child has an allergy. The translation house in question claimed to use professional translators (aligned with EN15038 which means a translator, reviewer and an independent QA is employed to check the target document translation) and yet we found examples of text which had been translated using the same output Google Translate spits out.įor the phrase “May contain nuts”, Google translate returns the French translation of ‘may contain nuts’ as ‘Peut contenir des noix’ – looks about right, doesn’t it? Well, noix translates as walnuts so the phrase returned can be understood as ‘may contain walnuts’. ![]() If you’re trying to remove an incumbent company a great way of getting the client to listen to you is for you to proofread their text and present the findings to them, especially if it has a legal connotation to it (for instance food packaging or medical documentation). Whenever I spot this (believe me we can tell) I do my best to tell the company involved.Įarlier this year we used this very method to remove a translation agency supplying a very large global retailer with translation to be used on their international packing. What really makes me sad is when we see examples of translation companies using Google Translate as their own work. One of the most popular posts on the language blog is about when packaging translation goes wrong. When companies rely on this type of machine translation, the shortcuts become painfully obvious to readers of the final product. Machines are unable to accurately convey or understand all the nuances involved with a localization project. The practice of maintaining a multinational marketing message and ensuring the feel of the original language is kept the same takes a high degree of knowledge and skill that can only come (at least for the moment) from human involvement. How do we compete with something that’s perceived as being free? I can talk about how much time, effort and money are required to get the original English document right, so surely when approaching the translation aspect, at least some respect should be paid to the quality of language used, especially when the originator may not be able to read the results. Over the years I’ve lost quite a few projects to people translating legal contracts, user guides, websites and most recently, translating food packaging, with Google Translate. ![]()
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