Out of the world’s 7.5 billion residents, only 20% or about 1.5 billion speak English. Companies can’t rely on machine translations to reach the other 80%.
We can all agree that machine translation has made impressive strides recently, but it really is the the millions of content translators who are working quietly in the background to make it all possible. This goes for everything from global marketing to politics and everything in between.
In order to localize content for target audiences, content translators have emerged as key contributors to the global economy. Without their contributions, there would be a lot more "lost in translation" and cause miscommunication, lost sales or embarrassment.
For example, in this article, one company wanted to sell their pens globally, so they had their slogan “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you” translated into Spanish. The new slogan read “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant." We are pretty sure this was all of the things we just mentioned we DON'T want translations to do.
Perhaps they should have used more reliable translators.