Translating a Page You Cannot Check

The problem is that it is good

Machine translation used to produce output that was obviously wrong, which was a form of protection.

It now produces fluent, natural text, so a reader has no signal that anything is amiss.

Which means an error in a translated price, guarantee, or condition sits invisibly on your site being read as authoritative.

And you cannot find it, because you cannot read the page.

Where errors actually occur

• Terms with a precise legal meaning.
• Conditional statements: unless, provided, except.
• Negations, which occasionally invert.
• Trade terms with a specific local sense.
• Measurements and currency.
• Tone, which can land as rude or as too familiar.

The second is the dangerous category for a business. A guarantee that applies unless the item has been modified is a very different sentence from one that applies if the item has been modified, and that distinction survives translation less reliably than the surrounding prose.

Grade the pages by consequence

Since translating everything to a professional standard is not affordable and translating nothing is a missed opportunity.

Anything stating a price, a term, a guarantee, or a legal obligation gets a human check.

Anything describing what you do, in general terms, can be machine translated and reviewed lightly.

Blog posts and background material can be machine translated with a note saying so.

That grading takes ten minutes and usually finds three or four pages needing a person out of thirty.

Paying for four pages properly is affordable in a way that paying for thirty is not.

A worked example

A business translated their whole site, including their terms and their guarantee, using a machine tool.

The result read well and a customer relied on the translated guarantee, which stated something slightly broader than the original.

The dispute was resolved by honouring the translated version, which was both the decent course and probably the required one, since it was the version the customer had been given.

They had the three pages containing terms retranslated properly, at a cost far below what the dispute had cost.

The rest of the site was left as it was.

Which is the correct arrangement rather than a compromise.

Which version governs

A question worth settling in writing.

Where you publish terms in two languages and they differ, you have a problem that a sentence can prevent.

State on each version which language governs in the event of a discrepancy, which is standard practice and takes one line.

That does not remove your obligation to make the translation accurate, and it clarifies what happens when it is not.

Note that in Quebec there are specific requirements about French that go beyond this, so anything sold there needs advice rather than a general rule.

For a business serving elsewhere in Canada, the governing-language line plus accurate translation of the important pages covers it.

Get it checked, not retranslated

A cheaper option people do not think of.

Asking a translator to review and correct machine output costs considerably less than asking them to translate from nothing.

They read faster than they write, and most of the text will be fine.

Give them the original alongside so they can check meaning rather than just fluency, which is the point.

For four pages that is a small job, and it is the difference between a translation you can stand behind and one you are hoping about.

A bilingual customer or contact can also do this for you, though be clear you are asking them to check meaning against the original rather than to see whether it reads well.

Do not rely on the browser doing it

Since the alternative to translating is frequently letting the reader translate.

Browsers now offer to translate a page automatically, which many people accept.

That is genuinely useful and it means your terms are being read in a translation you did not produce and cannot see.

You have no control over that and no realistic way to prevent it.

What you can do is write the original plainly, since simple direct sentences translate more reliably than complicated ones, by machine or by anybody.

Short sentences, one idea each, and no double negatives is good writing anyway and translates considerably better.

Mark what is machine translated

Where you have published pages you have not verified.

A short line saying a page has been automatically translated and the original governs is honest and sets expectations.

It also invites correction, and readers do write in to point out errors, which is free proofreading.

Put it at the top rather than in the footer, since it is only useful before somebody reads.

And remove the line as pages get properly checked, so it stays meaningful.

Check the parts that are not prose

Since translation attention goes to paragraphs and the errors frequently sit elsewhere.

Form labels, button text, error messages, and confirmation emails are all translated separately or not at all, and a form in one language with a confirmation in another is a common result.

Those are also the moments somebody most needs to understand what is happening, which makes an untranslated error message worse than an untranslated paragraph.

Submit the form yourself in the second language and read everything that comes back, including the email.

That five-minute test finds more real problems than reviewing the page text usually does.

The counter-case

Machine translation is a real advance.

For a business that would otherwise have no second-language version at all, a fluent machine translation of descriptive pages serves customers who would otherwise have been served by nothing.

Quality has improved to the point that ordinary prose is frequently indistinguishable from a professional rendering.

And most pages on most sites contain nothing where an error would cost anything.

Grade the pages, pay a person to check the three or four that carry obligations, and write the original plainly.

What to do

1. List pages with prices or terms.
2. Have those checked by a person.
3. Ask for review, not retranslation.
4. Supply the original alongside.
5. State which version governs.
6. Mark unverified pages.
7. Write the original in short sentences.

Step three is what makes this affordable, since reviewing machine output costs a fraction of translating from nothing and catches the same errors.

What a second language does to the page itself is covered in what a second language does to your layout.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.