
Context is key personalization - paramountīeyond geographic localization, words can be “local” to a business or industry. Google Translate simply does not support businesses’ localization needs. An attorney in the United States is referred to as a solicitor in England.įrench speakers in France may use the same words as those in Quebec - same as Portuguese in Brazil vs Portugal - but words and phrases could have vastly different meanings or even no meaning at all. Let’s say you are a native Japanese speaker trying to translate a message for an English-speaking audience it can be challenging to deliver 100% accuracy without knowing exactly where the English speaker resides, and the variations of the language in that area. In fact, even within a country, people living in different regions or on opposite coasts use words in different contexts.

Have you ever tried using Google to translate the phrase let’s play it by ear from English into Spanish? We did, and unless you are planning to (physically) play with your customer’s hearing, such literal translations become meaningless. There are countless idioms that exist in one country and not the other. Anyone who has used it can attest to the textbook, oftentimes, word-for-word translations that fail to truly capture the essence behind the words. The problem with Google Translate is that the quality of the translations isn’t always accurate. It is able to, more or less, help facilitate communication and understanding. The first thing companies want to know when evaluating Google’s translation service for business use: “Is Google Translate accurate?” As a general-purpose solution, Google Translate is simple to use and helps bridge the gap between foreign speakers. But if your business values the customer experience, then generic machine translation alone is not enough.

Today, more than 500 million people around the globe use the service to communicate and decipher foreign languages for everyday conversations.īusinesses also turn to Google Translate for assistance in providing customer support or to translate their websites and digital marketing collateral. Google Translate debuted in 2006 as a multilingual neural machine translation service, engineered to translate text, documents, and websites from one language into another.
