The Consequences of an Inferior Italian Translation
April 15th, 2009“Traficante” is an Italian mineral water company which was welcomed by Spain’s underworld, the reason? Its name was translated directly into Spanish. And its literal Spanish meaning is “drug dealer”.
The above may sound like a joke, but it is true. Imagine the losses the mineral water company faced just because it did not ensure quality translation. What is more unfortunate is that such events are alarmingly frequent.
Inferior Italian translations happen when the translators are not qualified and/ or experienced enough. They also happen due to use of automatic translators or free translation services which translate by replacing each word in the source document with its equivalent in the target language. Say if you are getting free English to Italian translation done, the translation software would go about the process by replacing each English word in the original document with its Italian equivalent. Such Italian translations have a probability of ending in fiasco as mentioned above.
Inexperienced translators are also prone to such errors. A person who is not well versed in both the languages involved in an Italian translation would likely make literal translation and when the other language apart from Italian is significantly different from Italian then the translated version would not reflect the meaning of the original as intended.
Free Italian Translations or Professional Italian Translations - Your Choices
February 27th, 2008There are two simple choices that you need to make when it comes to translating a document and these are whether to use the services of professional Italian translation or use free Italian translation services. Free online translation are legitimate means of understanding foreign words as it can aid a person to understand the main meaning of the source language’s content. However, online translation is usually not enough to effectively do the entire translation as it has many shortcomings.
The trouble with free Italian translations is that they will only substitute words from the source language into the target language in a mechanical way. This means that you will only get an approximate translation of the source language because online free translation only is able to substitute one word for another according to the word’s dictionary meaning and not its meaning as contained in the text.
However, a free translator is still good enough to give you an idea about what the text in the source language means. This is why many people are attracted to availing of the services of a free Italian translator. If you don’t want the exact translation of the source language and you just need an idea about what that text means, then using free Italian translation may be sufficient to suit your requirements.
On the other hand, if you actually need an exact translation of the source language, you will have no choice but to use professional Italian translation services. This is when using the services of free English to Italian translator will not suit your needs.
In fact, when you need to translate a legal document, financial or technical and even medical documents, you must only use professional translation services because there is no scope for any inaccurate or approximate translations.
To sum it up, using free translators is OK if you are satisfied with an approximate translation of sorts. However, for precise translations, better handover the job to a professional translator.
