The importance of language translation

Every day, knowingly or unknowingly, we enter into a pool of transactions that we call the global economy. The coffee that you consume every morning. It would most likely to have been imported from South America. From daily necessities to luxury goods, the item we buy, sell and consume is invariably imported around the world. It stands to reason that where there is an exchange of goods and services there will also be translation requirements. From user manuals, contracts, emails to a host of other types of documents, there is no business if there is no communication. Here, professional translation services may be worth its weight in gold, for a communication breakdown may halt the progress of a business deal or even break it off completely leading to financial and legal consequences as well as a lost opportunity. With the blistering pace of advancements in technology and improvements in AI, there has been talks that the roles of professional translators would become obsolete. Only very recently Skype has launched functionalities that would allow translation of voice/video calls in real time. The combination of voice recognition software and Artificial Intelligence is truly breathtaking and will have a place in the translation market. As discussed in previous blogs, there are situations which you may find machine translations useful and what it is not, is a substitute of a professional translation agency. Software by its very nature is well suited to efficiency and automation, which is not the main purpose of translation. Legal documents for example is well known to have very long sentences and very complicated syntax, judging by the quality of a machine translation today, it will be a very long time until it will render a legal translation provider obsolete.