Every business wants to expand and try and reach new potential customers. Most often, executives agree to step into another market, typically in another country, and try to develop a new strategy there. This means writing content and doing communication in another language. And, since speaking two or more languages isn’t something everyone can do, businesses turn to free online translators.

While free translators may seem harmless at first, they’re potentially harmful to your business. Below, we’ll discuss why not to use free online translators for business.

●      Accuracy

Free online translators all work on the principle of automatic machine translations. When you assign translating software to translate a piece of content, it doesn’t understand the context, the style, or the fine nuances of your writing.

Instead, the machine will translate this combination of words, most often leading to:

• unclear meaning

• inaccurate translations

• poor sentence structure

• wrong use of synonyms

Your translation will easily lose the original meaning and the message you initially designed will not be conveyed accurately.

●      Readability

In business, it’s extremely important to maintain a high readability level for all your written content. It doesn’t matter if it’s a blog article, social media caption, email newsletter, or business proposal. The reader has to be able to understand your message quickly and easily.

Unfortunately, with free translators, no one can guarantee the same level of readability was kept. And, since you don’t understand the target language, there’s no way for you to check it and see if it’s good.

This is why finding a translation service with human translators is a better idea for your business. Isaccurate is a website that can help you find a service you can trust. That way, you’ll know the translated text is as readable as the source text.

●      Cultural Nuances

Free online translators always translate the text literally, word for word. But, sometimes you need the source text to be adapted to this other market or person and their culture.

For instance, if there’s an expression in English such as ‘let’s call it a day’  and your free translator simply translates every word into the other language, it won’t make any sense to the people reading it later. Why? Because this is an English language idiom, and it needs to be differently translated or explained.

Therefore, you can’t rely on these free translators to do text adaptation and localization, to make it fit the culture and language of the other target market.

●      Data Protection and Security

If you don’t want your business information to go public, you shouldn’t use a free translator to translate them. Why? Because pasting your text into these translators automatically makes them public.

This can lead to a data breach, information leak, security threats, and even customer dissatisfaction.

This means that your business’ security becomes severely damaged, and this threatens to ruin your credibility. This is another major reason why you should avoid free translators for your business needs.

●      Mistakes

Finally, even though the free translation tools are seemingly free, you can end up spending a lot of money fixing the mistakes it has made in the name of your business. Here are just some of the pricey mistakes you may end up paying:

• – reprinting wrongly translated materials
• – losing a sale due to a poorly translated email
• – changing ad campaigns

In global, translations with mistakes and poorly presented ideas will damage your brand’s reputation, and all your business goals. No matter how good are the marketing tools for business you’re using, if your translation is not spot on, your efforts will be in vain.

Concluding thoughts…

Free online translation tools are great for translating a phrase you don’t understand or something you want to send privately to a friend or an acquaintance. But, for business needs, they’re too much of a risk and should be avoided.

Instead, find a professional translator to do your official business translations, or outsource a writing service that can help. Just don’t let poor-quality translation ruin your business credibility.

Author’s Bio

Andrew Mazur is a business copywriter and blogger. He writes about building brand awareness and creating memorable business content to help you reach all your goals.