Different types of translation services are important for different purposes, and it is essential to choose translators who understand the context and culture of the group you are translating into.
After all, whilst English and Polish are different languages, the language of marketing and the language of medicine are different as well, and require a knowledge of which words have the correct connotations for a particular field.
This is what makes the role of machine translation so complex and leads to a fundamental ethical question; is a bad translation better than no translation at all?
Despite the huge technical advances over several decades in the field of computer translation, there are still fundamental technical barriers when it comes to technical language, imagery and words with ambiguous translations.
According to a study by the British Medical Journal, Google Translate’s accuracy when translating medical phrases is as low as 57.7 per cent, which is astonishingly low given that medical communications are often a literal matter of life and death.
Despite this, they have become a very popular tool due to their widespread availability and instant albeit questionable results. Tools such as Babel Fish in 1997 became popular as they allowed people to access web pages in other languages and enabled rudimentary communication between online users from different countries.
This has caused several problems where a mistranslation has led to devastating real-life consequences.
A man holidaying in Israel took a picture of a bulldozer but the Arabic caption of “good morning” was mistranslated as “attack them” in Hebrew and the man was arrested. Similar cases of mistaken arrest have been found in Denmark and in the United States.
The most tragic case, however, was in South Korea. A Chinese man said through a translator that he hoped to hang out with a Korean couple. However, the term the translator used, whilst technically accurate, has more lurid implications in Korean and led to a fight which consequently led to a murder.
Ultimately, machine translation is better served as a tool to assist human translators, who refine and verify the automated translated language.