Don’t Trust AI: Use Humans at a Translation Company
by Chad Richardson
You might have heard that artificial intelligence is improving. Services like Google Translate make it easy to copy and paste text in a box online and get a full translation in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, these translations have a reputation for being laughably bad.
But new artificial intelligence has some people reconsidering artificial translation. In November 2016, a new, advanced translation service from Google Translate showed improved translation results in 16 different languages. The new results have understandably impressed people around the world.
Whatever progress artificial translation has made, a recent competition between Human and AI translators shows that artificial intelligence still has a ways to go. The competition pitted professional human translators against three AI translation services. In the competition, all of the entrants had 50 minutes to translate literature and non-literature passages from Korean to English. Two professional translators judged the results, not knowing whether human or machines did the translations.
The results did show some promise for the advanced Google Translate, the highest scoring AI software with a score of 28 out of 60. However, the human professional translators defeated them by a landslide, with 49 out of 60 points.
AI translation services might help laypeople quickly get the gist of a document, but the services still have serious limitations. They miss key slang and proper names, and often they miss even basic grammatical tenses in the translated languages. With more sophisticated types of translation, such as technical science terms and legal documents, the problems grow exponentially. For a strong translation, using a professional, human translator remains the only way to get the job done.
Contact us to receive sophisticated, human done professional translation services in a wide variety of languages.
Related Articles
Bridging the Language Gap: The ROI of Professional Language Services in Healthcare
For small and medium-sized healthcare providers in the U.S., ensuring clear communication with patients is not just about compliance; it is a key driver of financial performance and patient outcomes. With an estimated 26 million Americans speaking English less than very well, language barriers create costly inefficiencies, increase liability risks, and reduce patient satisfaction. According…
Language Services in Healthcare: A Key Strategy for Achieving Health Equity
For healthcare organizations, ensuring clear communication with every patient isn’t just best practice; it’s a legal and ethical necessity. Patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) are more likely to experience misdiagnoses, treatment delays, and substandard health outcomes due to language barriers. A recent San Francisco Chronicle report revealed that several California hospitals scaled back professional…
Why Hyper-Localization and Personalization Are Defining Global Success
Translating content is no longer the benchmark for going global; it’s the baseline. As businesses expand into new markets, what truly drives growth in 2025 is the ability to connect meaningfully with audiences through hyper-localization and personalization. These strategies are redefining how brands communicate. Hyper-localization adapts your message to reflect not just a language,…
here
for you
We’d love to learn more about your translation and localization needs.