What Is Google Translate Good For?

Prospective clients for our professional translation services sometimes ask us about Google Translate, or other online translation tools. Google Translate and other similar tools are forms of machine translation.

Is Google Translate Good Enough to Use?

Inquirers might sometimes ask, “Is Google Translate good enough for us to use for translating our material?” The material might be marketing materials, legal documents, technical manuals, and numerous other categories of text. The answer is always “no,” it’s not good enough, that is unless in addition to accurate communication a goal is to provide entertainment in the form of often amusing translations.

Google Translate Is Useful for This

We have found one good application for Google Translate, probably just not the type of thing you might think. Our company receives requests for translating many different types of documents and text based files from various languages into English, and vice versa. Although we work with non-English languages regularly, occasionally we’re unable to positively recognize the language of a file we receive. In those instances, the ‘detect language’ function within Google Translate can help us identify the language of a document that we’re not sure about.

In those cases we can cut and paste a line or phrase of text into Google Translate, and the tool will identify the language for us, usually with good accuracy. This is one useful utility of Google Translate.

 

See also: Translation Services Buyer’s Guide