Website translation without website localization or rather fighting a losing battle.

Welcome to the era of globalization: it is getting more and more difficult to stay updated about everything and, whenever we feel we are, something new has already come up and we start rushing again; an endless and permanent run towards the most unattainable chimera: the overall knowledge.

There is actually an amazing and extremely fascinating potential about all this hurry and learning how to manage to deal with this mad house as effectively as we can, it can only bring great advantages. Every era boasts an essential tool which has changed the way we live and the king of them all for the twenty-first century has to be Internet, and the incredible variety of websites it offers. What is Internet? It is an international network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, linked by a broad array of networking technologies. To make a long story short: the way we can communicate with almost all the rest of the world and learn about what it can offer to us.

The latest statistics show that we have recently exceeded 1 billion websites a milestone which, according to the experts’ estimates, has been reached in September of 2014.

What are the content languages for these websites? There are several and obviously English rules on them all, but it is important not to underestimate some other idioms which are getting more and more widespread. Here are some useful figures, related to the percentages of the languages on the net, in particular the top ten list: English 55,7%, Russian 6%, German 6%, Japanese 5%, Spanish 4,6%, French 4%, Chinese 3%, Portuguese 2,3%, Italian 1,8% and Polish 1,7%.

Website managers and content developers are more and more aware of how it is important to have their websites translated into other languages in order to attract as many visitors as possible.

Website translation is a very common practice nowadays, especially for commercial websites: reaching customers from all over the world could be a very fruitful practice, therefore depending on the target market a company decides to address to, it would be more than recommended to translate a website into the potential clients’ language. Many people know English, but it is not always easy to understand all the content of a website if English is not their mother tongue. Moreover, people are getting lazier to thoroughly read all the information on a website and if in another language it can turn into a mission impossible!

Here comes the next step then: website localization: What is localization: it means to make a product or service more suitable for a particular area: and that is also website localization. It comes from the word “loco” which means place (nothing to do with the Spanish LOCO, it comes from the Latin locus, even though the majority of machine translation can be definitely defined as “loco”). Some concepts can even be slightly changed due to cultural boundaries. And a machine translated text is not aware of those limits.

Machine translation for a word is possible, actually the more specific and technical the word is, the easier it is to hit the right translation, but broader meaning words or sentences, concepts, never mind expressions, become a lost cause.

On a basic level, website machine translation performs a simple substitution of words in one natural language for words in another, but without human website translation and localization it usually cannot produce a good version of a text in another language because recognition of whole phrases and their closest counterparts in the target language is essential. Here comes the crucial role of human website translation.

Computers are good at computations and logic, while humans are exemplary in reasoning and imagination. The only way to perfectly adapt a text is using, besides language knowledge, those last two skills. Sometimes a machine website translation versus a human website translation is understandable but wrong, some other times it is incomprehensible. In both cases there is only one word to define the machine translation: unprofessional.

Another key difference between humans and computers is that humans can easily learn new concepts: surely adding more and more glossary to a website translation software or tool means to fill gaps, but only a website human translator can perfectly translate into another language without getting lost in translation.

To conclude with a bitter laugh, here is an example I once read on a hotel site once “You can leave your values at the reception”. There go down the drain the values of a translation. And the credibility of this site.