Sadly, our beloved US Market intern Shabnam is leaving Textcase. After 6 months of hard work, she’ll continue to finish her degree at university. Since she is originally from Iran, I wanted to say good bye in her mother language: Persian. However, instead of asking one of our own translators, I decided to take Google Translate for a spin.
Even though Textcase is an official Google Partner thanks to our excellence in Google AdWords, we would never recommend any company to translate their website, documents or mobile application using Google Translate. To support this statement, let’s go back to my little conversion with Shabnam.
As I said, I wanted to say good bye to Shabnam. The exact sentence I formulated was ‘see you later’. Since I didn’t want to be too hard on Google, I changed the expression to a full sentence. What I eventually fed into Google’s machine was ‘I will see you later’. It resulted into the following:
من شما را بعدا مراجعه کنید
Happy as a child that just learned his first word, I showed the above to Shabnam. As soon as she started to laugh I knew what happened. The Persian sentence provided by Google didn’t make any sense at all:
“I you come back later”
The ‘come back later’ part is even considered to be a formal way of dismissing someone who interrupts you while you’re on the phone.
So Google has a hard time translating this basic and actually very common phrase. However, maybe I confused Google by providing a full sentence, while I should have stuck with the shorter expression: ‘see you’. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work either. Google came up with:
می بینید
Which means ‘you see’ as opposed to ’see you’. Not exactly what I wanted to say. To save me from more translation torture, Shabnam provided the correct translation:
بعدا میبینمت
What’s next is the most astounding thing you have ever seen. If you translate Shabnam’s sentence back to English, you’ll see ‘see you later’ appear in the right box. How can’t Google get this right the other way around? How come they can translate Persian to English correctly, but fail when translating English to Persian? Is it because of the Perso-Arabic writing system which connects the letters to beautiful strings of words?
I’m not sure, but there’s one thing I want to make clear: Google Translate is a great tool if you need a quick translation for a language you don’t speak and if the interlocutor isn’t offended when you make a mistake. However, when you need translations for your company’s communication, like websites, contracts, manuals, brochures and other documents, hire a professional human translator who knows the characteristics and nuances of his or her language. Otherwise there’s a big chance you’ll make a fool of yourself!
Thank you Shabnam for contributing to this blog!