Why Native Speakers are (99.99%) Irreplaceable

Temptations abound in our professional lives, and one of the easiest traps to fall into nowadays is online machine translation services. They're free (or stupid cheap), they're easy, they're accessible, they don't try to negotiate deadlines or ask annoying questions about context, so why not sneak them in when you can? It couldn't possibly hurt.

For some documents, this is true to an extent. There isn't necessarily going to be a notary or publication committee scrutinizing every punctuation mark and clause, so a little intermittent wonkiness can't do that much damage. Maybe people will think the translator did a bad job, but perhaps your audience is too small or too indifferent to things like that for you to throw money at solving this problem.

Another easy trap to fall is in hiring non-native translators, by which I mean translators that translate into a language that is not their native language. Differences in price are usually a big motivator for this - why hire an American translator to do the work when you can get some Eastern European (or a machine translation service) to do it for a quarter of the price?

In a nutshell, this is why:

This is an excerpt from a job advertisement on a freelance website searching for a native English speaker who 1) knows Russian fluently and 2) can fix an extant, bad translation. Worse still, the client has likely paid a decent sum of money for this poor translation; even at the pathetic rate of $1 a page, the client lost $300 and now has to pay even more money to make the same book readable.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not uncommon. Translators with questionable ethics will take on any project at any size just to get the money (even if they are totally unqualified for the task), copy-paste a bunch of Google Translate-d paragraphs, do zero proofreading, and submit a pile of incomprehensible, hot garbage to the client. They present potential customers with rates that seem too good to be true because they are, and then the customers receive an inferior, sometimes useless product after it's all said and done.

Let's be optimistic, however, and assume that the translator wasn't trying to squeeze cash out of some poor soul, and was instead simply not skilled enough to produce something better than pseudo-Google Translate-d hot garbage. This is an unavoidable risk when you are working with non-native translators that you do not know, which is why most freelance platforms make a point of allowing freelancers and clients to leave transparent reviews of one another.

The best solution to both of the issues presented above is simple: wherever possible, only hire translators who are translating into their native language.

Translators who are actually worth their salt typically embrace this principle because they understand two fundamental truths about the job:

1) The divide between "novice" and "professionally fluent" is a river. The divide between "fluent" and "native speaker" is an ocean. #deepmetaphors

2) Even the most well-read non-native translator will never match up to an equally well-read native translator 100 times out of 100, which means that someone will justifiably complain about your work sooner or later and your reputation will take a hit.

One of the grandest deceptions out there is the fact that most people outside of the language services industry think that language learning looks like this:

In reality, the graph looks a lot more like this:

How on earth can this be?

Professional fluency certainly can't be that abysmally low!

This is nonsense - you're just trying to push your own services and line your pockets!

1) Easy, I'll explain.

2) It is, really, I swear.

3) I would have become a lawyer if I wanted easy money. *drum hit*.

As a member of the U.S. Consulate staff in Moscow once jokingly told me, "I can negotiate nuclear treaties in Russian, but I can't order a sandwich at a restaurant." Professional fluency for most people who aren't full-time language service folk almost always implies an extremely narrow focus that is a direct complement to their job as diplomatic staff or whatever else rather than their primary skill.

Translators and interpreters, however, have to be able to address any need at a moment's notice as well as do the necessary research to make sure the product is airtight.

New seasonal menu at a restaurant? Done.

Cease and desist order? Easy.

Technical specifications for a firefighting installation? No problem.

A hoax letter allegedly written by the President and accusing the Pope of being a Nazi? That was quite literally last Tuesday.

The range of what we must know is expansive and often unpredictable, which is why many translators and interpreters ultimately wind up settling into a certain field that then becomes their area of expertise. Think of every single "word set" you know from your own personal experiences, education, and work history, and think about how often you use them.

You know the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, America has a bicameral legislature, and that you can simplify polynomials by removing the lowest common denominator. And that's just a sliver of the seventh grade!

The considerable gap between near-native fluency and non-native fluency can be closed over a lot of time with a lot of diligent practice, but you as a client don't have time to wait around for that to happen with a non-native translator.

Hiring the right person for the job means you get to skip a lot of the aforementioned hassle simply because there's no real substitute for a lifetime of language learning.

Even if the price is a bit higher than what non-natives or machine translation services offer, you are guaranteed to save money in the long run seeing as the job will be done correctly the first time. On top of that, your newly translated content will communicate the message it is intended to rather than befuddle and confuse your readers.

Watch out for deals that look great on the surface and never hesitate to ask for samples of work! I've been translating for almost eight years now and I still provide samples for clients who ask free of charge.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!