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Is Google Translate Enough?

Is Google Translate Enough?

Dubai has made significant progress in its scale of economic activities and development over the recent decades. This progress has been accompanied by major changes in relation to its population structure and living conditions. However, this emphasizes that translation services in Dubai are considered an important tool in the quest to bridge the gap between peoples and between cultures.

Also, the need for qualified translation companies in Dubai has drastically increased, particularly in this rapid and continuous economic growth era. However, some recent papers claim that Google Translate is now almost human-like or that it is getting closer to that of average human translators. On the other hand, Some Linguists and scholars have argued that Google Translate will never reach the quality of a professional human translation. The present article seeks to investigate the issue of Google Translation accuracy by comparing and contrasting the pros and cons of Google Translate.

What is Google Translate?

Machine translation (MT) is the use of a computer to render texts, sentences, and words from the source language into the target language by the employment of computational software. However, Google Translate is the most applicable and best-known application for free translation services. It’s a machine translation service developed by Google, to render different written texts from the source language to the target language, and it provides 90 translating languages.

When and When Not to Use Google Translate?

The results of pure Google Translate contain many errors and are often more amusing than useful. A pure Google translation can only be used or understood with the correction of a professional translator. Certainly, Google Translate can be a solution for a mass production perspective as a result of technological development and the global world’s demands of knowledge transfer from one language to the other.

Nevertheless, Google Translate can be useful in catching the meaning of a text or to get a general idea about the meaning of the overall context. It can be used only for easy sentences or with the correction of a translator. However, Google Translate can be very helpful in many cases. For instance, Google Translate is free and faster. Google Translate is also useful when coping with the vast amounts of audiovisual material, both commercial and user-generated, that needs to be translated quickly.

How does Google’s free translation service work?

In 2016, Google Translate was updated, which improved the accuracy of the provided translations nearing human-level quality. Google Translate works through neural networks that search for an equivalent pattern on the online database to translate a given text into the target language. These neural networks are a special case of statistical learning models. Still, the statistical engines don’t analyze texts based on syntax and semantic analyses; instead, it built by analyzing bilingual units from the bilingual content on the Internet. Therefore, this method causes fatal mistakes in the translation; mostly, it retains the source text’s grammatical features without reflecting the target language’s naturalness.

Pros of Google Translates service

  • It’s an online free translation service that instantly translates text and web pages.
  • Google Translate is very fast; it is claimed to be translating 100 billion words per day.
  • Google Translate’s free translation service is aided by statistical models to generate its translation from the existing online data produced by humans. 

Cons of Google Translation service

  • Lack of the ability to analyze the text on the syntax level and semantic levels.
  • Mostly, it cannot render the real meaning of the idiom and the cultural-based texts into the target language.
  • Machine translation did not succeed in transferring the right grammatical aspect and linguistic features into the target language.

Our team of professional translators and linguists in Legal Translation Dubai is ideally positioned to collaborate with their clients in Dubai and the rest of the UAE. And demonstrate that they can provide human and machine translation services solutions, helping our clients decide which method best fits their translating needs.

At Legal Translation Dubai, we utilize the CAT tools method when needed. These CAT tools are used in the translating process in order to deliver the highest quality of translation as well as consistent terminology throughout each project.

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