Hearing how much of a help machine translations are, is no longer a foreign thing to many of us now. Living in a world where we are often seeking things to be done quickly and easily, it is not a surprise that many of us are relying on the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo translators. Online and machine translations do have their own benefits and they work at times but of course, there will be times where you cannot trust the translations produced by these applications online.
As an example, I have typed “I fell from the tree and it hurts” onto Google translate and the Malay translated texts produced were “I jatuh dari pokok itu dan ia menyakitkan”. In this simple and short sentence, not only were there grammatical errors but the system has failed to translate the word ‘I’ into Malay! In instances like these, the end user has to be alert of such errors and make the sound decision to not put his full trust and faith onto online translation applications.
This is the reason why many professional translators push for human translation instead of machine. With the presence of human beings working on the copies, these professional and trained translators are able to fully understand the content better than a machine would. In addition, they are also able to sift out other aspects such as nuances and emotions portrayed and would translate accordingly, something a machine translator is unable to perform.
Personally, we wouldn’t recommend machine translations but in cases you need to use them, be sure to double, if not triple check before using the translated texts for submission!