As a business of English speakers trading in Europe, we frequently need to communicate with non-English speaking customers. While we use professional translation services for form emails and e-books, we rely on Google Translate to understand the basic intent of emails and reviews written in other languages. The translation isn’t perfect but it’s good enough to get the sense.
When you’ve used this tool often enough, you get familiar with certain words. So ‘thank you’ in German is ‘vielen dank’. But we noticed something strange going on at Google Translate when we recently translated a simple sentence and got several lines of German out the other end, especially as there was no reference to ‘vielen dank’:
We found text with certain phrases ends up being translated as a comment on a Tripadvisor review of all things! So in the example above, the simple phrase:
Thank you for taking the time to leave a review, we’re delighted
when translated back to English, ended up reading:
However, we hope to help you with your travel plans. This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC Was this review helpful?
Even when I ran the German output through babelfish.com, my backup translation tool, the output wasn’t much better:
However, we hope that it helps with your travel planning. Original English Language Weaver evaluate you this translation: thank you very much for your review
We’ve reported this to Google, but the take-away lesson is to make sure you review the output of translation tools. It helps to have a basic understanding of the language you’re translating to, or translate the output back to English using a different service just to make sure the intent is right. And if you happen to have gotten an email from us making no sense at all, please forgive us!