The Reality of Using Google Translate

Google Translate can feel like saving grace when traveling to a foreign country where English isn’t the first language. However, you might want to rethink solely relying on it to translate any business emails or documents.

Google Translate uses statistical machine translations. When it first was introduced the software would translate the term being looked up into English first then cross referenced the phrase being translated with millions of documents taken from official United Nations and European Parliament transcripts.  As of 2016. Google announced they would be introducing the Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) which used a “deep learning” practice that would compare whole sentences at a time from a broader range of linguistic sources. This new feature allowed for translations with more accuracy and reliability. However, this doesn’t mean the feature is entirely perfect.   

Because of the numerous double meaning words in the English language relying solely on Google Translate for linguistic service could lead you to legal trouble when translating documents and contracts if not done correctly. A study showed this was a problem seen by airline companies in their “terms and conditions” page.

Besides improper translation and miscommunication being a problem, the other downside is if you’re working with personal information from a client, when the information is entered into the software it automatically becomes property of Google. This could be a big problem if there were to be a data breach and your client’s information were to be leaked.

Improper translation could send the wrong message to your clients and give off an unprofessional impression. When it comes to business translations, it might be smarter to hire an outside translator to avoid any problems with miscommunication   

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