Google Translate

Many non-translator friends have recently quizzed me about Google Translate. Some laud its ease of use and the respectable quality of its input (for a machine). But it has the nefarious effect of commoditising translation — which is something many translation agencies have been doing for years, mind you.

High-end translation services will always look beyond the words on the page to achieve "equivalence". This entails using the most appropriate syntactic structures for the target language in question, editing out detail that would be superfluous in the mind of the target-language reader, and adding in extra information that may be needed to assist comprehension.

Can't imagine Google ever achieving that...