Can I Use Machine Translation Software to Translate Business Documents?

 

When translating different business documents, your goals can be unique and diverse. While some documents address employees, others may address stakeholders, clients, or customers. Therefore, the tone and the structure can also be different for different business documents. When recipients and readers of those business documents speak languages other than the language the documents are written in, it becomes critical to translate them because stakes in the business are always high.

 

Even a single mistake in translation can bring down the brand image, lead to legal troubles, cause the business to lose clients, and may develop other complications. So, when it comes to translating business documents, one must trust only professional business translation services. However, with the increasing number of paid and free translation software tools, you might wonder if it is okay to use them to translate business documents.

 

So, let’s see what it can mean to use AI tools for translating documents for your business.

 

Is Machine Translation a Good Option for Translating Business Documents?

The honest answer is NO. Regardless of what claims a translation software company makes about the accuracy of their AI translation software, you cannot completely trust the translation work done by AI translation tools.

 

When communicating with people from different countries or cultures, accuracy alone is not good enough to make them understand the content of a business document precisely. It’s because the complexity of words in different languages is way too higher. While some words might have suitable meaning in one language, their exact translation may make the complete sentence awkward or confusing. Besides, formatting, tone, and other nuances cannot be accurately presented by AI translation software.

 

Thus, when it’s about your business, you should prefer hiring professional business translation services from a translation agency with a team of human translators specialized in all those languages that you are going to need now and in the near future. Professional translators, also called linguists, know what tenses, words, and phrases to use to provide an equivalent meaning, instead of a word-for-word translation.

 

Professional translators spend years of life learning and understanding a language and the subtle nuances associated with it. This includes everything right from grammar structures to idioms, popular phrases, and how certain words can have different connotations in a foreign language. Many words are spelled identically in a language but have vastly different meanings depending on the context.

 

Take the English word “run” for example. This seemingly easy word is anticipated to have 645 different meanings. While a professional linguist can understand the right meaning of the word instantly, a machine translation tool cannot be expected to come up with the right translation for varying contexts.

 

Semantics is the leading global translation service provider with a team of more than 5000+ linguists that support over 150 languages. We have worked with numerous clients across the globe from diverse industries, including education, automobile, travel & hospitality, e-commerce, finance, law & governance, IT & software, and more. No matter what the requirements for your translation project are, you can place your trust in our professional business translation services.