Machine translation limitations -Mediocrity

Good content thrives on personality, persuasion, and a narrative. Copywriters have a box of tricks at their disposal to tick all these boxes, including wordplay, metaphors, and heavily condensed language. But this is also precisely where machine translations struggle. They are “generalists” that have been trained using quantities of words. They lack linguistic sophistication and imagination. This affects the readability of a text. Mchine translation interprets texts sentence by sentence, which is why conjunctions and textual references are skewed or incorrect. AI translators also don’t pay much attention to the tone and rhythm of a text – meaning a carefully constructed sales argument or cross-channel brand story loses its impact. Human translators are able to assess the broader context of a word in a sentence within a text, and decide the correct translation accordingly.

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