Soon I will be translating Ender Technology's web site to Spanish. There are some technical terms that I need to get familiar with so I have started doing my research and started playing with Google's translator. Google translator can be very useful when translating a word and even phrases but I am not sure about full sentences. For instance, our home page reads: ' Welcome, Ender Technology is a Los Angeles web development company providing a broad range of technology services from simple web design to the planning and development of complex web applications.' I used the google translator to translate this text to Spanish and I got: 'Bienvenido, Ender La tecnología es un desarrollo de Los Angeles web de la compañía proporciona una amplia gama de servicios de tecnología de diseño de páginas web sencillas a la planificación y desarrollo de aplicaciones web complejas.' Uh huh?? If you speak Spanish, you might be able to understand the message after reading it ten times but is anyone going to spend that extra energy on trying to understand the text in a website? I really doubt it.
This tool is definitely useful to find out how to say/write a word in another language but if you are going to implement it in your site I would reconsider it. Translating is not the same as interpretating and in order to interpret a message there needs to be a human touch.
