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A head cinema of noble bitter chocolate and meadow cream

This might sound like gibberish, but strange turns of phrase like these are what you are likely to expect when machine translation is left to its own devices. At one point or another, we’ve all used the likes of Google Translate or DeepL to translate snippets of text in the blink of an eye. When it comes to speed and price, machine translation will always beat human translators hands down. But professional translators make up for this with their accuracy, linguistic intuition, experience and country-specific knowledge.

This intuition comes to the fore when translating idioms, for instance. In German, the word “Kopfkino” literally means “head cinema”, but actually conveys the idea of playing out a scenario in your mind – becoming lost in translation and spouting gobbledygook like the Mad Hatter, perhaps. While Google Translate often can’t get to grips with idioms, making sense of common sayings is all in a day’s work for translators.

Admittedly, Google and co. make our lives easier if all we want is a rough overview of a foreign text. But if the translated content is destined to be used for professional purposes – a survey or presentation, for example – relying on a machine could open you up to ridicule. Just imagine what your survey participants would think if “noble bitter” – the literal translation of “edelbitter”, which is a German term for describing dark chocolate – appeared as an answer option in a study about sweet treats…

Translating open-ended responses using a machine could also be risky business if the results aren’t checked for accuracy. There’s a chance that the software could mistakenly translate brand names, leaving you with phrases like “meadow cream” for a product from skincare brand La Prairie. That wouldn’t exactly be a bestseller among hay fever sufferers. Unlike skilled human translators, machine translation will in all likelihood also fail to recognise that brands like Lynx and Wall’s in the UK are called Axe and Langnese in Germany. These examples may all sound amusing, but they could distort your study’s results if they aren’t spotted and corrected.

Machine translation is constantly advancing, but it’s still some way off from outperforming human translators. For translations that don’t make you look foolish, it’s always best to turn to the professionals. After all, surveys go through several rounds of revision before they’re ready to be used, so don’t their translations deserve the same care and attention?

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