Google Translate is an online translating service that offers us the possibility to know what a text means in seconds. However it isn’t a service that could replace the professional translator.
Let’s read the next paragraph as an example:
Once upon a time there was a dear little girl who was loved by everyone who looked at her, but most of all by her grandmother, and there was nothing that she would not have given to the child. Once she gave her a little riding hood of red velvet, which suited her so well that she would never wear anything else; so she was always called ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’
As we can see, this is the beginning of a very popular children’s story. Let’s use the Google Translate tool to see what happens.
Érase una vez una niña querida, que fue amado por todos los que la miraba, pero sobre todo por su abuela, y no había nada que ella no le habría dado al niño. Una vez que ella le dio una caperucita de terciopelo rojo, que le quedaba tan bien que ella nunca usaría cualquier otra cosa, por lo que siempre se llamó “Little Red Riding Hood.”
The result is comprehensible, but full of mistakes. This doesn’t mean that Google’s translating tool works badly, but rather that we are attributing to it functions that it doesn’t have.
As we know, translating isn’t just about changing the words from one language to another. It is necessary to adapt the text’s meaning, the grammar, the cultural references, etc… And this is what a translator does. So this way Google Translate or any other automatic translator is only a tool (a very powerful one) for translating. There’s a tendency to think that a translator is some sort of “dictionary man” that knows all the vocabulary in various languages. This isn’t true, not even an interpreter is one. The proof is the vast amount of times one has to go around the topic or insert explanations in an interpretation so that the message could be understood.
The translator works with time and can consult the words that he doubts or doesn’t know in a dictionary. The automatic translators reduce this “looking-up” time by selecting the word with the highest probability of being accurate. Nevertheless, the translator always has the last word.
A great that advantage automatic translators have is that they can be integrated in translating memories such as: Deja vú or OmegaT, completing their work and reducing the production time of the translator.
There are a lot of examples about the misuse of the automatic translators; we find them daily in tags, instructions, web pages, mails or forms. Someone decides to save by not hiring a translator and directly uses the text generated by an automatic translator. This occurs not only in small companies or in Southeast Asia. The Department of Migration of the United States of America was, for a long time, giving out this healthcare form to foreigners entering the country.