Google Translator vs. Human Translator – Who Wins?

Catering to the needs of every consumer is essential in business. Otherwise, it will be challenging to achieve desired goals. The best way of reaching a broader client base is by building a website that has information provided in different source languages. An obvious option for translating web content into other languages is hiring professional translators, but it is an approach to follow that may prove costly. As such, online translation from Bing Translator and Google Translate may be a convenient choice. Translations provided by such tools are fast and offered at no cost. However, choosing which one to use, you have to weigh the pros and cons, features as well as performance of each to get a high quality of your final translation.

It’s worth noting, though, that machine translations offer the essence of speech on a document hence refinement should not be expected from it. It can combine words to create sentences, but it cannot understand the correct meaning. It can be helpful if trying to determine if a document contains specific information but may not be beneficial that much if trying to understand how a topic is related to your document. For that reason, neither Google Translator nor Bing Translator can outdo human translators.  Now, I must confess that the Chinese phrase was utterly incomprehensible to me. I translated the challenge phrase into French myself, keeping the intended intention in mind. None of these machine translation services are fully coherent, thus not acceptable in legal or official translation scenarios.

Lately, the machine translation service has become quite popular. People download Google Translate App because of its many features. It provides speech translation and works with almost all of the popular language pairs. It is a statistical machine translation that often uses predictive algorithms. The accuracy of Google Translate has improved recently. Custom machine learning can be given credit for the improved accuracy of Google Translate. In app form, the settings panel has made Google Translate useful to a lot of people. The use of optical character recognition by Google allows the app to read images in a better way.

But Google Translate struggles begin when you need help with complex phrases instead of standard terms. It can work perfectly with common terms, especially if you need the translation of European languages. If you require the accurate translation of technical terms from Google Translate or ask for its help with an Asian language, you won’t get good results. It is good with the most common languages and English translations but only if you don’t need help with complicated phrases. Choosing an app for maximum time saving on translations will only end badly when you need a human expert to correct the errors.

Both Google Translate and Bing Translator have virtually similar formats. Each has two rectangular text boxes placed on the web page. The text box to the left is used to enter content to be translated, while the one to the right shows the translation results. Both also give you the choice of entering a web address of the site content that you need translation for. If you are using the web version of Google Translate instead of the android app, you can also get document translations from it. But it may fail to keep the original formatting of your document translation intact.

Language Variation

Both are capable of translating not only English but other languages as well. This gives you the power to translate any supported languages into any of the given renditions. However, Google Translator can translate more languages, up to 63, while its Bing counterpart can manage up to 37 various languages. The languages not supported by Bing and Google include Swahili, Icelandic, Basque, Filipino, Yiddish, Cantonese, Afrikaans, and Irish.

Online Translation Accuracy

According to The New York Times article, the three most prominent online translators were matched against each other for accuracy. When compared with human translations, they were nowhere near accurate translations. But Google Translate seemed much closer to the correct translation, especially for French and Spanish. The code in Google Translate and neural learning are a few reasons behind the service’s accuracy. Best-in-class quality: Google has a rich history of providing translation services to consumers and organizations. Google Translate offers many add-on features.

The Interface

Bing and Google Translator have a minor variation on their interfaces. Each allows you to pick original and target language names from a dropdown menu located at the top of the page. You can then paste the content or address of the webpage on the left text box and select the part that needs to be translated. The right-hand side text box will then show the results of the translation. The difference is that Google Translate enables users to hover the mouse over the phrases or terms that need alternative translations. This unique and valuable feature is lacking in Bing.

Google’s app for android and iOS offers a better user experience. It has a voice input option that lets people speak into their phones and get translations. They can also edit translations before copying them to make them more accurate. The camera input allows users to take pictures of the content they need to know the meaning of. Both voice input and camera input features have been a hit with users. The latter uses optical character recognition to gather information from images.

Google Translator vs. Human Translator:

Google’s language service was launched as a statistical machine translation service. To gather linguistic data, it turned to European Parliament documents. But its creators failed to realize that in everyday lives, people don’t talk like politicians. Although statistical machine translation services can be accurate in certain situations, they are not always helpful. Today, the app and service work best when people require English translation. But when the target language is Chinese or Korean, you can’t trust the result of the app—customization matters for the domain- and context-specific terms or phrases and formatted document translation. As a result of Google’s most recent improvements, the translator now supports six additional languages ( new languages include Bosnian, Cebuano, Khmer, Marathi, Hmong, Javanese ).

People fear translation products provided by human experts for a few reasons. They think that translation pricing will hurt their budget. Some of them believe that they won’t be able to find experts for specific language pairs. They also fear that they won’t have enough control over the results to be able to edit translations. But all of these concerns are baseless. You can find a native expert in any destination language easily. You are much more likely to find a native expert of Haitian Creole than to get its accurate translation from the internet. If you hire the right service provider, you won’t worry about translation pricing. A human translator won’t have to go through the United Nations or European Parliament documents to provide you with accurate results.

With human experts, you don’t have to worry about the target language. They won’t only help you with English translations but with all types of destination languages. You can even get accurate speech translation if you send the audio to a human expert. No matter how complicated the technical terms are, you will get accurate results. You also won’t have to worry about the original formatting, as translators will make sure to keep it intact.

You don’t need an Android app to connect with foreign language experts. You won’t have to find a machine translation engine on your own or check if it gathered the correct linguistic data or not. You can look up service providers and pick one with the best ratings. They will offer you affordable rates and maximum time-saving options so you will get accurate results quickly. This was causing some annoying display issues on the WordPress Dashboard.

If you can get the services of human experts, you won’t have to pay for a floating widget. You won’t have to navigate your way through the settings panel to find the right option, nor will you have to turn to Google Cloud to access a translation. You will get accurate written words translation whenever you need it.

Final Thoughts

Even though Google Translator is useful for performing simple translations or getting the basic idea from an email, it cannot handle the figure of speech such as idiomatic expressions for most common languages. However, it seems to perform pretty well with French! To Google! I typed in the Chinese characters, surrounded them with quote marks, then did a Google search for that exact literal string. And so, given that information supplied by Google Search, I came up with my phrase “South Study special aide.” It’s too bad Google Translate couldn’t avail itself of the services of Google Search as I did. Fixed an HTML attribute issue displaying in the menu shortcode.

Google Toolbar offers a lot of features to users. Statistical machine translation can help us in a lot of situations. But we need to understand that we can’t survive without the help of linguistic experts. The floating widget option for websites users is only helpful when it comes to common words and phrases. It is only human experts who can handle all source languages in their complicated forms. Language experts use statistical machine translation from time to time. But they review their translation products before handing them over to the clients.

Language experts translate millions of documents every day, and many of them work without the help of statistical machine translation. This shows that the Google Translate tool, despite its many useful features, cannot compete with human experts. Google Translate tool is helpful for travelers when they are in a foreign country. But statistical machine translation won’t help them when they apply for a visa and need to get their documents translated. In conclusion, human experts win from Google Translate by a considerable margin. Besides, online translation services offer cost-effective automatic translation proofreading services and professional translation services. If you submit 5,000 characters for translation and include two target languages for a batch translation request, the total number of characters to process is 10,000. Charged characters To calculate usage, Google counts use on a per-character basis, even if a character is multiple bytes.