(Source: Business Insider)
I’m sure KFC, having forked over good money –in fact millions of dollars in international advertising fees- only to have one of the most powerful catch copies of all time garbled for the Chinese market, would not consider machine translation either useful or meaningful!
Here’s that copy in case you missed it in the CNN video:
“Finger-lickin' good”And here’s how it got screwed up -um, lost- in translation:
“We'll eat your fingers off”(On an interesting side note, the image above is a play on this infamous translation blooper advertising restaurants at the JFK Airport food court).
Machine translation is being billed by marketing spin doctors as an alternative to, and is therefore in direct competition with, professional human translation. These outrageous claims are made by manufacturers of machine translation software that obviously have a vested interest in seeing their wares sell, and by so-called professional translation companies that don’t have a clue about the efficacy of this product nor the ability to assemble a team of professional human translators.
Unfortunately, this false promise of economic efficiency and effectiveness has struck a chord among the general public.
Indeed, we get plenty of customers that were duped into using machine translation on their websites only to reap disastrous results -- Economic loss, legal woes, and worse. One particular customer out of Sri Lanka comes to mind. When I asked this client how much he paid for the machine translation solution on his used car website that he was contracting the Translation Services Japan to replace, I was very surprised to learn that our Japanese translators were cheaper! That bears repeating:
A Japanese-to-English translation solution by professional human translators turned out to be cheaper than a failed machine translation solution!If I have not made my case against the dangers of (using) machine translation, then consider the following article: Machine translation forces major Japanese publishing company Takeda Random House Japan Co., Ltd into bankruptcy
