Did you know that none of the free sites such as Babel Fish, Word Lingo will provide you with an accurate translation? Why is that?
A computer does not understand the text, the context, the idioms, the grammar and can only translate what it knows. It is a great tool to get a general idea but should never be used for a professional document.
When using a software, you need to be aware of its limitations and the many mistakes that the machine will give you.
The most common mistakes are found in the marketing industry, the legal and medical field. Each one of those field has its own set of lingo, sentence structure and is comparable to a technical translation. But when our team put even a simple sentence to the test, the software did not come close to a native translator.
This is what the free software translated from English to French: "to be fully eligible" became the "to be fully skilled", "he is great" was translated by "he is big", "I have a killer headache" by "I have a headache of a killer" and many more example such as this one can be found with any translator software.
French for example as a specific way of formulating sentences. Each word has a gender: feminine or masculine, the software cannot make the difference between the cat as "le chat" or "la chatte". Only a native translator can with the context of the sentence. Since the adjectives have the same gender than the noun, then the software translated most everything into the masculine gender. In most cases, the prepositions were translated by a wrong one or by a verb. The order of the words were completely wrong and so on and so forth.
If you want to have an accurate translation, you must hire someone who is a native of the targeted country. So if you want your Japanese document translated into Mandarin, you need a Mandarin translator who speaks Japanese. If your document is from Spanish to German, you need a person who has German as a mother tongue and knows Spanish etc
You will find many different types of translation agencies around the world, offering you different services, different prices in different formats with a different turnaround. Be aware that a translation agency that gives you a very cheap price might not offer you the best quality of services and a very expensive one is no guarantee either that your translation will be perfect.
When you decide to have your documents translated by a professional agency, you must plan for a budget. You must be ready for a "real quote". Do not expect to have a 20 pages web site translated for $100 or a 20,000 words documents done for $200. It will cost you anywhere from $1200 to $4000. Just imagine how much it will cost you to hire a full time attorney, a full time accountant for a full month or a full time web designer. Their rates should give you a good estimate on how much a translation done by a native speaker will cost you.
If you are backing off because of the prices, remember that there is more to a language than just putting some words together, the translator must give an accurate meaning, turn a document free of grammatical errors as well as misspelling, and keep your business image intact at the same time.
