by Mei-Ling Chen

A new client commented: “I trust you will get the meaning as well as the words in all translations. It is very important.”

When customers say this to us, as Director of Translation for many years, I understand what they mean.

It is vital to get the correct meaning in translation. Even more important is to know who your author and target audience are. With this information, the experienced translator is able to make a judgment call.    

Then the translation can be written from the point of view and background of the original author. Whether from a CEO to employees; a department of communications to the general public; or a teacher to a student—the tone, style, and presentation will have to vary. This is a powerful difference that an excellent human translator can make!

With due respect to machine translation, I must say that in order to achieve the above requirements, excellent human translators are needed.  These are translators who have good sense, can analyze the text and the background, and successfully conduct research.

Sure, machine translation may be able to get a rough idea of what a passage is about and what languages are involved. But think twice whether it can boost your company’s image, or provide the quality that your company is looking for.      

If you are lucky, things might turn out right; but if a human has to edit or find bugs in the work done by machine translation, what could possibly happen?

– a waste time, resources, energy
– the need to scrap the work, and redo the entire project
– troublesome enough where you may want to smash the machine software!

This is why we believe in real, genuine devotion to quality and research when working on a translation project.