Why Hire A Pro?

Product descriptions, construction manuals, hotel websites – the weirdest, sometimes completely unintelligible translations can be found in many places nowadays. The reason for this is not hard to find: professional work is not free of charge. Picking up a dictionary, asking an employee not specializing in translation to quickly translate something is much cheaper – but not very professional. Here are some examples of what "low-cost" translations can look like.

Children Courts

One word – many meanings. Of course, everybody can open a dictionary to look up a word, but they should also manage to find the correct entry, should there be several to pick from. A computer program will soon be stretched to its limits as it does not recognize the context. Translators find the matching translation as they understand the context. These ominous "Children Courts" were meant to be dishes for children on a menu, but the German word "Gericht" can mean both court and dish.

Computer translation:

After all, what is also of the inadequacy of the translation tell you, it is one of the worthiest and most important transactions in the general education world.

Source text:

Denn was man auch von der Unzulänglichkeit des Übersetzens sagen man, so ist es doch eines des wichtigsten und würdigsten Geschäfte in dem allgemeinen Weltwesen.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Correct translation:

Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.

The limits of a computer translation …

You are in the %d kingdom now! Give me all your %s!
<player1> wiped the floor with you, pal …
Sandra, my boy, I brought you 5 cherry!

Especially when working in the video game industry a translator needs to be able to handle placeholders. Failure to do so can result in the placeholders actually showing in-game or lead to the text inserted messing up the sentence's grammar.

Translators are no walking dictionaries either. They learn from their work, search for the meaning behind the lines of a text, make it comprehensible in their language. And ask if something is unclear, for only then can they work as language intermediaries.