Is free translation a good idea?
Free translation services are often offered by translation agencies on their homepages. So why doesn’t better languages offer a free translation tool on our homepage? What is our view of free translation? 1) How free translation works The way free translation tools work, is that they use a computer programme to “translate” a short piece of text. As this can be done instantly by a machine, they can offer the service for free. So what is the catch? 2) Human editing and authoring v a machine All our translations use the most complex and amazing computer technology ever invented, in other words they are human authored and edited! Despite claims of 70% accuracy by the machine translation industry, all you have to do to prove how poor machine translation is, is to paste a short paragraph of text into one of these free translation programmes, then to back translate the result into the original language and compare the two. Guaranteed result – rubbish. 3) Free translation trivialises a highly
