Leave it to the professionals

I was recently handed a leaflet from a chateau somewhere in western France (I won’t name names), available to the public advertising their facilities and describing the beautiful and picturesque location. The French descriptions, coupled with the glossy photographs make for a quality leaflet, however look a little closer and the English translation will make you smile.  The translation from the French clearly has not been done by a native English speaker (the syntax sticks too faithfully to that of the French). Moreover, the final text doesn’t seem to have been proofread either with typos, punctuation and grammatical errors littering the page. Unfortunately this is far from a rare sight in tourist literature, and I (and I am unapologetically geeky about this) make the point of looking out for leaflets and other material when I am abroad to feed my ‘habit’.

So if a company is going to the effort and the expense of producing a glossy brochure to promote their business why allow such linguistic errors to become fixed in ink? Once something has been printed going back and making edits and reprinting can be hugely expensive- not to mention the costs involved in the embarrassment factor. The sad fact of the matter is, translation is still viewed in these situations as a non-essential commodity.  Budgets are tight, particularly in the current economic climate, and so where corners can be cut to save a few pounds (or euros) they are. Inevitably, then, quality of translation is not a priority as the cheapest option is sought out. For many enterprises quality is of a lesser issue, price reigns supreme (in China for example) and the result is often laughable.

Google Translate has added further fuel to the fire of quality issues allowing many companies with little linguistic knowledge to think they can bypass the professionals altogether. Although machine translation is, arguably, a useful tool it can by no means replace the brain of a human translator. This is also true for local market knowledge and cultural awareness. So as to avoid red faces and possible offence it is definitely best to leave it to the professionals!