Globalization is rapidly opening up the world into one global village. Businesses are now catering for global customers and people are easily migrating from one country to another for work, business or travel. However, with it comes a challenge of language barrier. Moreover, the need for translating documents, statements, websites and any other form of text becomes essential. While machine translation is being widely used and is believed to take the place of human translation, it can only change a text from one language to another. Human translation is crucial in taking care of the grammar, idioms, context and the tone of the original document. Quality and accuracy in translation is important, which only human translation is able to achieve. Here are seven industries where translators become essential experts.
1. Healthcare & Medical
The medical field can use translation services in translating journals/white papers, medical reports, clinical trials, instructions for medical equipment, prescriptions, post-discharge details and patient records among others. Translation in the healthcare and medical industry is crucial as it involves life. A slight error in translation can lead to delayed diagnosis, incorrect treatment, inability to offer healthcare services and misinformation among others. All these can be a threat to life, which is why stakeholders in the industry need to invest in human translation services. Moreover, medical documents have difficult terminologies and abbreviations that only a human translator who is well versed with such terminologies and with in-depth knowledge of the subject matter can be able to translate them well in the context that they have been used.
2. Academic & Corporate Education
Education institutions and corporations that are focused on attracting foreign audiences worldwide can benefit a lot from human translation services. Education institutions can use human translators to translate course materials, academic transcripts, parent consent forms and marketing literature for effective communication with foreign students and parents. Corporates, on the other hand, can ensure proper training of their staff who speak a different language. Experience is everything when it comes to impressing clients and improving employee engagement. Human translators can promise the highest level of cultural sensitivity and linguistic accuracy that machine translation can't. This can help educators and corporates offer the best experience to international students/parents and employees respectively.
3. Legal & Contract Documents
Accurate translation of legal and contract documents is essential where individuals involved speak different languages. If these documents are translated inaccurately, it can lead to adverse legal consequences, breach of contracts and can also be a threat to human rights. In addition, formatting of legal documents differs from country to country. In addition to being accurate, legal translators need to be able adapt the legal format of the target language if the formatting required differs from the one used in the original document. Such are intricate details that a machine can overlook.
4. Government & Legislative Content
In this interconnected world, government agencies have the task of communicating effectively with other government agencies, citizens and foreign governments. Moreover, communication has become more linguistically diverse, which calls for proper translation of government information into legally mandated languages. Just like in legal and contract documents, mistranslation can lead to serious consequences. Thus, human translation services are essential in translating text contained in government websites and social media accounts, immigration documents, government forms, legislation briefs and press releases among others.
5. Travel and tourism
The internet has made it easier for travel enthusiasts from all over the world to book flights and accommodation as well as find local attraction sites and dining places. However, most people want to find this information in their native language or at least a language that they can understand. It is therefore necessary for stakeholders in the industry to ensure that travellers get access to this information in their preferred language. Machine translation leaves room for errors that can be quite an embarrassment for businesses. What’s more, unprofessional translations can be the reason why clients run to the competitors. For businesses in this industry, human translation services are essential if they are to attract global clients.
6. Insurance
Insurance operations are going global with the increasing globalization. Insurance companies therefore have the task of delivering the best international customer experience to their linguistically diverse clientele. Moreover, this starts with ensuring that international clients understand the information contained in websites, underwriter documents, risk assessments and claim forms among others. However, insurance documents combine finance, healthcare and legal aspects. Merely translating these documents word for word, as it is in machine translation, can’t suffice. Insurance companies require human translation services if they are to get it right.
7. Media and entertainment
Media houses and entertainment products such as films, music and games are continually gaining global viewership in this age of the internet. Of course, this is a big opportunity for stakeholders to reap big profits. However, this can’t be possible if global audiences who speak a different language can’t understand the content therein. The need for human translation services are essential for translating captions, subtitles, lyrics, scripts and episode descriptions among others. The human translator magic is essential here in order to avoid errors that can be a turn off to consumers.
Conclusion
Humans will always prefer consuming content in a language that they understand. However, with word for word translation, the meaning can be lost, message driven out of context and the final text culturally insensitive and embarrassing. Thus, industries ranging from insurance, entertainment, medical, legal, education, travel and government agencies need human translators if they are to achieve quality and accurate translations.