The Battle Between Man V/s Machines For Language Translation

By Author: david lee
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A person, who has visited a foreign country for official or personal reason knows the hassle of purchasing products while trying to speak a foreign language. The confusion that ensues can be overwhelming whether bargaining on the streets, or buying online.

However, for e-commerce companies considering the mode of language translation and to decide the companies and the languages to lay emphasis on can be very unnerving. It is even more difficult to come up with an estimate for the number of speakers (in diverse languages) across the world, as the numbers become dated as soon as they get published.

• Chinese, Spanish or English

These three languages prevail over each other every time. Mandarin Chinese is known to be the most widely spoken language, since it belongs to the world largest ethnic group. Spanish tows in second with a vast geographical reach and it uses several diverse dialects. English catches up third and is widely recognized as a language used across the world for business and technology.

• How to choose a language for your website?

This decision must ...
... be influenced by the markets you choose to serve and defining your current growth strategy. Presently, Spanish, Japanese, French and Chinese are one of the most common languages that are localized. If your target country is U.S.A whose second language is English, Spanish is a fair and good choice for them.

• Human v/s Machine Translation

Thankfully there are several translation tools and services readily available for the merchants who want to grow their business and enter the foreign markets, or for the non-English speakers who’re found everywhere. The truth is that there’s no sure-shot way to get a perfect translation without human interference. Still, there’re some tools that exist and provide automatic translation and provide USB printing, for free.

The problem arises when the task comes to choose the right translation service for language. There’re some translators that easily translate from English to European language but when given the task to translate to other languages, they fail. This happens because they’re not able to understand the coding of a different script and a language that belongs to a different language family. Adding to that, these tools use previously translated material and statistical analysis to provide appropriate translations with poor results.

• Feedback of machine translators

The feedback provided by the users for these translators is intelligible, but not very eloquent. Some others stated that the translation was not very accurate and the website was also rendered. There were some who gave positive reviews too for the machines language translations.

Finally, the most accurate way to get a translation is through human touch. Certainly it would be a costly affair for the companies hiring the translators, since companies require translations for product descriptions and translators may not prove to be accurate enough.

Let the merchant decide Ultimately it is up to the merchant to decide on which translator to choose. The choice can depend upon if the website has been already launched and how much money, time, and efforts are required for the translation.

• Summary

In the end the merchants can choose any tool, but primarily they must’ve the users in mind and ensure to test the translations before it is delivered.

Cavalier Studios is a company that provides language translations and you can try them for any of your business translations.