The need to communicate with people of other nationalities, especially for business purposes, has demanded increasingly accurate translations that are able to carry a message over into another language, causing the same effect that it would cause in the original language. Initially, automated translation (or machine translation) may seem like a good solution for these kinds of situations, but is it really able to generate the results you expect?

The truth is that, although they are constantly evolving, automated translations are based on literal adaptations. In other words, they don’t consider the sense of the words and the vocabulary related to the topic. Only a human translator will have the sensitivity needed to identify the best way to translate the message your company wants to convey, considering different contexts and cultures of the target language.  

For this reason, professional translation agencies rely on native translators, specialized in the different market segments and residing in the country where the content will be used, in order to ensure that the final communication will seem natural to the consumer’s eyes.

Below, you can see some of the advantages that human translation offers when compared to machine translation:

1. Language skills: familiarity with specific characteristics of the target language, making the final text seem like it was originally written in that language.
2. Cultural awareness: unlike translation software, a native translator is able to adapt the text so that it suits cultural, political and legal aspects of the target location.
3. Creativity: professional translators also come out ahead in terms of creativity. Capable of elaborating texts with style, they will resort to their own creative capability to find expressions that best match certain terms when exact translation is not possible.
4. Specialization: human translation allows for having professionals specialized in different fields, such as IT and Telecom, agribusiness, the automotive industry, cosmetics, etc. Thus, it is possible to achieve an accurate translation that respects the concepts and terminology of each market segment.

Armed with this information, it will be easier to make the right decision for your translation project, don’t you think? When choosing a partner, always keep the target audience in mind, as well as the degree of visibility that your document will have. And don’t forget: although it can really help, automated translation is no substitute for an actual native translator when message quality matters!

About Netwire

Created in 2000, Netwire is the Latin American market leader, offering translations into any language. With offices in Brazil and Argentina, the company serves approximately 25 market segments and has a network of hundreds of tested native translators, residing all over the planet. In the past five years alone, Netwire processed over 110 million words, delivering an average of 400 projects per month.