Google Translate versus human translation

The rise of machine translation has been the bane of many high-school foreign language teachers. Machine translations tend to provide fast, but shallow translations that lack the nuance and understanding of human translation. Translation service provider Verbal Ink has recently developed an infographic directly comparing the translation jobs of a human translator and Google Translate using the same source material in order to understand what the two did differently and how best to make use of these two different ways to translate language. The first test was composed of a marketing pitch in Spanish for the beekeeping industry. Verbal Ink asked a human translator to translate it into English, and then had the same pitch translated with Google Translate. The results were quite different. While the machine translation got the general idea across, the sentences and clauses were garbled, and the machine translation lacked coherence. The human translator was able to produce a much more easy to read translation, which was far more effective at communicating both the general idea and the specific meaning of the original piece. The second test was more advanced. The company recorded a Spanish speaker reading a presentation. Then, both the human translator and Google Translate first transcribed the speech into Spanish and then translated this written Spanish into English. Here, the machine was even more error-prone. It was unable to handle oddities of human delivery, like repeated words, slight mispronunciations, and other quirks. It left affected words untranslated. The human could decipher the original intent of the speaker, and was able to produce a translation that was more true to the speech both in terms of meaning and in terms of preserving the quirks of the speaker in ways the reader could understand. The test showed that machine translation and human translation are still quite different. A machine cannot truly understand what it is translating, and this makes it hard for the machine to translate nuances, cultural idioms, in-jokes, and other elements of language that require knowledge of how language is used on an everyday basis. There are two major advantages of using a machine for translation, though: speed and cost. Google Translate is free for anyone to use, and it can translate a large block of text quite quickly. On the other hand, a human translator needs to be paid, and will take more time to translate the same text. The infographic reveals the use cases of both types of translation: If all you want is to understand the idea of a story or product description, a machine translation is sufficient to get the gist across. If, however, you want to translate an artistic piece of writing, a political speech, or some other communication that requires precision and finesse to get the entire meaning across, human translation is required. <link http: verbalink.com services translation-services>verbalink.com/services/translation-services.