Why the World still needs translators
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- Created on Thursday, October 04 2012 16:12
As I said in my last blog, life of a US-marketer can be in many an aspect much easier than the one's struggling over our old continent. I mean, over here we can only dream of handling a 320-million market using only our mother tongue. For us, stuck somewhere between Brittany and the Adria, plethora of languages becomes reality as soon as our marketing ambitions outgrow the national and/or linguistic borders.
Question is, why, even in the 21st century, the translation software only does the job half way?
Because even a prefect translation, which even the best of the available software rarely provide, usually misses the point when talking marketing.
People of one culture tend to formulate things other way than somewhere else. What seems important for the Italian market might be utterly irrelevant in Sweden.
For some reason, the way the language is used in some Southern European countries can be less pragmatic than somewhere else. You'd better know that, when, for example, translating from English into one of those languages. Or, a typically Teutonic accent on technical details usually comes short in a Latin culture. Family values are set high in France, but not necessarily so when you go north.
Most of the time, it's not the translation the problem; it is how the content is formulated and its emphases.
Now, if these aspects are all too often neglected even by human translators, what can we possibly expect from software?
Some help and not much more, if you ask me.
So you'd best avoid using the software to translate your marketing messages at all and leave to a translator to do the job properly.
A good translator only lets the software serve as loose support to translate into languages he knows by himself.
ersonally, I strictly avoid using it for unknown languages. I never buy what the machine is suggesting me without using my own capacities.
How you ever might turn it, your day always turns better when you hire a translator, one who knows how things turn right there where you want to hit your target.
They are few and far between, but still worth of trying to find one.
