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Traveling to another country can be a stressful situation. Not only do you have to worry about your travel plans and accommodations, but if the country that you are going to speaks a language that’s foreign to you, you have to worry about how you will communicate. Ten years ago you could point out the tourists easily. They were the ones walking around with a translation dictionary, just trying to figure out simple phrases. Thanks to technology, we no longer have to haul around 10 books on our backpacking trip to Europe. Now, with the help of our phones, multiple languages are at the tips of our fingers. And one of the phone apps we use the most in such contexts is Google Translate. Which begs the following question. Is Google Translate good enough for use in business?
Google Translate is probably the best internet translator on the market today. It has a simple interface that is user friendly. You just need to download the Google Translate app onto your smartphone and enter the text you want to translate. Decide what language you are translating to, and, voilà, you have translated text. That’s not the only way you can translate text. Google Translate also has a visual component, where you can capture text with your camera, and it can translate it into a different language for you. Google has just announced an increase in the number of languages for visual translation from 7 to 27.
While this is a huge achievement for machine translation, there are some problems with this type of translation. Instead of focusing on meaning, this type of translation relies on previous translations of different documents and books. It isn’t translating exactly what you put in, but, instead, searching for phrases and sentences that have already been translated, and deciding which is most likely to be correct.
With all the different meanings of words and cultural implications, looking merely at a word by word definition is not the correct way to translate. In order to get the best translation, one needs to look into the meanings of words and how they best fit in another language. This is where you need a human translator.
Google Translate has definitely improved, and improved the way we translate things, but it is not reliable enough for any credible business to use for anything more than small projects. Google Translate is good for trying to get an idea of what someone is saying, but it is not able to provide accurate translations for businesses. For important documents, you need a proper translator to help you.
