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Cutting the Cost of Website Translation
Anyone who has tried to use professional translators to publish a website in different language versions knows the difficulties of the process. Not only is it slow, costly and time consuming but is frustrating, especially if you want to keep the translated versions updated as you make changes to the original site.
Machine translation is a cheap alternative but the quality is often low. Most publishers don’t have a convenient way to check the quality of machine translated output, so the ones who want to reach the fast-growing number of ‘foreign’ visitors are stuck between the high costs of localized versions that use professional human translators and machine generated low quality versions. Is there a happy medium?
Let’s take a closer look. Machine translation is acceptable, most of the time, for simple sentences or phrases. For example if you have a sentence like “This house was designed by the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.”. The machine translation into French comes out as: “Cette maison a été conçue par l'architecte célèbre Lloyd Wright Franc.” which is an acceptable translation. Copywriters, however, seldom concentrate on writing good original content geared for translation engines. It is a challenge to keep the language simple enough for machines to deliver a reasonably good translated version. Even with best efforts, the results cannot be guaranteed. Take for example the common term “Home” which appears on many websites to link users back to the home page. Machine translators for French would return “à la maison” or simply “maison”. The acceptable term in this context is “page d'accueil” or simply “accueil”.
Regardless of the language, the problems are invariably the same. Machine translated versions are not context-sensitive. As the language of the original gets more sophisticated, the quality of the translation will generally deteriorate. There are situations where one would never consider using machine translation. For example translation of advanced technical terminology like research publications, medical or pharmaceutical information or computer technical manuals. While the proponents of machine translation algorithms claim that the engines are improving and some inroads are being made through using specialized terminology banks, the results today are still less than acceptable for most applications.
With all its limitations, nonetheless, machine translation can be used in some non-critical areas. For example, if you are satisfied with getting the “ghist” of a newspaper article or email, machine translation would suffice.
The differences in time and costs between machine and professional human localization can be staggering. A machine translated version can be obtained in minutes and cost very little compared to the going cost of a professionally localized version that can cost a thousand times more and take weeks or months to deliver. Is there a happy medium?
To answer this, let’s take a closer look at machine translation. You can get a decent results from machine translation. If you want to take advantage of the low cost of this approach, the basic rule is to keep the content simple. In practical terms, this is easier said than done! Copywriters are often more concerned with getting the right message across to the target audience than worrying about translation, much less machine translation. While the quality can be improved by simplifying the original content, the results can sometimes be less than desired. This may be acceptable. For those who want to improve the results without incurring the high added cost of localization, use proofreading. Proofreaders cost less than one third that of localization and can be done much faster.
Proofreading is different from localization. The proofreader does not have to understand the language or see the original content. Proofreaders are proficient in their own languages. They review the results of machine translation and “smooth” the language so it flows better for the reader. They simply make corrections to the translated version so it reads well.
So for those who want to ensure a higher level of quality for their website translated versions, proofreading is the best alternative. This is necessary if you want to have greater confidence in the results, keep the costs down and can wait the extra time it takes.
If you insist on high quality results, localization by human translators is your only alternative.