Human Translation Services
After Google introduced Google Translate for free translations online, many people were under the impression that human translation had become history. It wasn’t only individuals who believed that, but also many businesses and business people. Google has a great reputation; however we should not forget that Google is a business itself, which is managed by humans. There are certain things that even Google is unable to achieve at this point (although they might be in progress).
In other words, if you are not sure whether Google Translate can fully replace human translation, the answer is NO.
Google Translate is an excellent translation tool for casual use—when you need to know what a foreign language text says without being picky about the details, while being open to errors, mistranslations, weird wording, and so on. If your friends post something on Facebook in a foreign language and you want to know what it is about, use Google Translate. You will get the meaning and you can guess the rest, so you might be able to complete the puzzle.
You can also treat Google Translate as a dictionary. It might serve you well when searching for individual words, but there are limitations to this approach as well. We would not recommend it for highly specialized terminologies, like those used in nuclear energy, pharmaceutical, medical or highly technical documents.
There is an alternative to Google Translate: Strategic Languages applies processes which are the perfect symbiosis of human translation and state-of-the-art technology. Our translators are humans who use specialized software called CAT (computer-assisted-translation) tools. CAT tools memorize text segments from the original as well as from previously translated documents. These matches are kept in pairs and saved for future use. Whenever we translate your new documents, our CAT tools suggest identical or similar text segments in the target language which have already been translated. CAT tools can speed up human translation, and can also improve terminology consistency throughout the whole project, even if several translators work on it. If CAT tools are appropriate for your project, you can get significant cost savings while keeping the irreplaceable human touch.
If you have a large project and want us to analyze it to see whether or not it will be feasible to apply CAT tools, please feel free to send it to us for review. Our human translation, combined with CAT tools, will enable us to start building the terminology database containing your company-related terminology. This database will be improved and polished with every new translation assignment. The projects most suitable for human translation using CAT tools are those with a high repetition rate of whole pages, paragraphs, text segments, or individual words.