“Google Translate Has Great Uses, Disastrous Misuses,” according to an article in the newspaper Deseret News. We agree.

There are useful times for an online translator run by a robot. I sometimes use one myself to see a description of a European car for sale online to just to know what options it has. But as soon as I need to contact the seller, I need a better option.

There are more than a few stories about people who thought that this rule didn’t apply to them. In some cases, these mistakes just caused amusement and laughter. For example, one newspaper mistranslation repeatedly misquoted a former president of Kazakhstan as referring to the important issue of “passing gas” when talking about the newly installed pipeline across the country.

It can’t be stressed enough. If you are doing something that matters in translation, you need to get a professional translation company to do it.

This will mean that real humans will interact with the text and ensure that it makes sense to the readers. It will be handled professionally and mistakes will be a rarity if they happen, because of thorough proofreading. Recent research by Arnold IT, the authors of the blog “Beyond Search” on the subject comes up with the same conclusion: “There’s no substitute for knowledgeable professional humans when it comes to the important stuff. It’s worth the investment of time and money.” We could not agree more.

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Why get a professional translation service?

Because you don’t want to come across to people as a big joke. This is especially true in business. Is there anything wrong with laughing? No! In fact, it’s been said that laughter is the best medicine, so why not plow through your business with incompetent losers who don’t know how to translate things? Come on! Make the world a better place and help people to laugh more. In case you don’t understand my tone, I am being SARCASTIC right now. Most businesses aren’t getting paid to do their jobs so poorly that people get a good laugh. Usually when people want to laugh they will watch a comedian or hire a clown.

Your business doesn’t need to clown around with translations to make people laugh! But just in case you don’t believe me, I am going to give you three ways that you can make a funny mess with translations.

3 Ways to Make a Mess:

1. Hire an amateur.

This way is almost sure to give some people a good laugh. Eventually they will translate a figure of speech literally (He’s knocking the ball out of the park on this one!) or misspell words in a funny way (*Please chack youres chang befour you live.*).

2. Just type your text in an online or computer translator.

This one doesn’t always work to help people laugh and make the world a better place. It usually just confuses people. To see just how bad these translators can be, just go to any translation program and put in a sentence and translate it to a language of your choice. Now take the translated sentence, cut and paste it back in and translate it back to English. In theory it should be the same sentence. But it rarely is, even on simple greetings! These programs can’t accurately translate complex subjects either.

3.  Just make something up and do it yourself.

If you are just picking between these three on this list with no other options, I recommend that you take this one. It will save you time and money with similar results.

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If you are looking for the professional translation of a document or project, the companies you are looking for should also offer localization services.

This term may be unfamiliar to you at first, but don’t worry it’s not anything to do with medical terms like local anesthesia and you won’t have to get a shot! Localization refers to more than just basic translation. It means that the professional translation company will make sure that your documents and your products will fit in with the local culture and context.

Why do you need Localization Services?

You may be asking why on earth you need something that you really didn’t even know about until a few minutes ago. There is more than one answer to this very good question.

1. Only 7% of communication is verbal.

Studies show that 93% of communication is transferred through voice tone and facial expressions! This makes the translation of your words that much more important. If your words are only half as effective because of poor translation or lack of context, your communication will go down to a mere 3.5%. No business can afford this. Also, since tones and levels of humor, sarcasm, and irony are all different in different cultures, you need professionals to help you come across correctly.

2. Different Cultures Have Different Levels of Context.

Anthropologist Edward Hall identified different cultures on a scale of high context and low context. A high context culture generally has many unspoken pieces of information that are assumed to be known or “implicit.” Low context cultures tend to be more “explicit” and assume in some cases that next to nothing has been previously communicated, so attempt to fully explain things. For example, a store where the owner lives in the apartment above may not have any sign on it, but the door is locked. People in the community know they can ring the bell and ask for the owner to open the store when they need to buy something. A low-context culture would think it absolutely necessary to have a sign on the door explaining that someone should ring the doorbell. A person in a high context culture might ring the bell to ask when the store is open and get the owner that way. The person from a low-context culture will wonder why the store is “closed” during normal business hours.

You can see that these differences can lead to great frustration between people of different cultures.

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