WordFly Language Services

It is a very thorny question, that of mechanical translators, which are proposed as a remedy for all translation problems, seeking to appear to be manna from on high: “What a marvellous invention” is the first thought which, in all probability, comes to mind for all those who need to translate a text into another language and light upon these ambiguous forms of software. Certainly, the thought of obtaining translations at zero cost can really appear alluring, when, on top of that, one thinks of the waiting time, given that a mechanical translator delivers in an instant...

Well, what does it deliver? A job lot of words, often without sense, and even more often with a sense which is completely different or in any event altered compared to what is expressed in the source language. All inter-spaced folkloristically here and there with words in the source language, which the friendly tool does not know and therefore leaves unaltered. It goes without saying - a great result.

In the age of communication par excellence, in which the image of a company or of a professional occupies a primary position among the ranks of objectives which cannot be renounced, a calling card such as a text which is ungrammatical, incongruous, or in a world, terrible, becomes an unmerciful boomerang. A leap in the dark, with ill-omened consequences.

Translation, like all forms of human expression, cannot be, and never will be imprisoned in the labyrinths of a software. It cannot be, nor ever will be, catalogued in a poor pseudo-glossary, in which a single word corresponds to one single (!) meaning. It is not, nor will it ever be, the language of machines, because it will always have need of creativity, of imagination, of sensitivity, and of the talent of the human being.