Why You Shouldn't Use Google Translate for Business Purposes?
You went to a foreign place and didn’t understand the menu at a restaurant. What would you do? You would probably open your phone, go to Google Translate, and translate the text. Voila! You are safe from a certain disaster of choosing the wrong food item. But what about businesses? Is it that easy for them with Google Translate?
Google Translate is quite an impressive machine learning system. It supports 109 languages and has a user base of over 500 million people (as of 2016). The popularity of the tool is immense.
While Google Translate can be used for elemental translation, for businesses where translating confidential data is involved, the machine translation tool is not an ideal choice. Also, the translation output the tool provides is absurd compared to human translation.
Hiring a translation agency in Bangalore is preferable to relying on Google Translation. Here’s why.
1. Your Data is Unsafe
Many businesses learned the hard way that Google Translate is unsafe. Sensitive and confidential business data gets published online after using Google Translate. It happens because of Google's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
The terms allow Google to use any information you put into Google Translate in many ways. It is a free flow of your confidential data everywhere.
The case is the same with any other online machine translation tool. There is no guarantee of daa safety. Hiring a professional translation agency is thus an ideal solution as it abides by data confidential agreements.
2. Far From Understanding The Nuances
Google translates literally. Yes, every word. The tool is perfect for smaller and less complex sentences. When you type in text with complexity, Google fails to translate it accurately.
As a business, you need your text to be presented as natural as possible to reach the target audience. But with Google Translate, understanding the context of a text is still a far cry.
Translating literature, poetry, music, and text with emotions and subtleties is a challenge for Google Translate.
3. No Guarantees on Translation Accuracy
Being a neural machine, Google Translate gets its translation power from millions of human contributors. This brings to question translation accuracy, and there is no guarantee of translation accuracy from Google.
Also, the online translation tool’s terminology database on legal, financial, scientific, and medical sectors is limited. And that is why hiring a translation company in Bangalore for professional language services is highly recommended.
4. Transcreation is Impossible
Translation alone cannot bring results, and many brands have learned it. Transcreation, where you recreate the text by localizing it, is helping brands expand globally. By transcreation, you are essentially rewriting the content to suit the cultural values, add local expressions, etc., to attract the audience.
If you prefer Google Translate for transcreation, the results would be disastrous.
5. Unsuitable for Translating Regional Dialects
Google Translate is poor at picking everyday nuances in a regional dialect and fails miserably to translate. Take the example of Spanish. The language spoken in Spain is different from Spanish in South American countries.
Unless you hire a good translation agency in Bangalore that understands the regional differences, depending on Google Translate proves costly.
6. Translation Quality Depends on Language Pair
The translation quality on Google Translate depends on the language pair you select. Language pairs like English-Spanish or English-Japanese have high accuracy. As these are the most sought-after languages, the Google Translate database has a fair grasp of these languages.
When there are uncommon language pairs, say Korean to Hindi, Google Translate fails miserably.
7. Do not provide proofreading and editing
Being a machine tool, Google Translate does not provide proofreading and editing services. One should only assume that the translation provided is accurate. But, ask any translation professional, and they will tell you about the importance of proofreading and editing.
Proofreading and editing will help
• maintain a professional tone
• reduces the margin for error
• will keep the original business message intact and
• Make the text sound humanistic
Should You Avoid Google Translate?
Google Translate is a popular tool, no doubt about that. Millions of people use it daily for better communication. But, Google Translate for business is altogether a different matter.
Its use for businesses is limited, and it has many issues that are yet to be resolved. The solution for businesses thus is to hire a translation company in Bangalore that can deliver accurate results, abide by data confidentiality, provide localization, and have a quick turnaround time.