My colleague has just sent me an old photo and feels the urge to raise awareness through our translation blog.

Being a Chinese native, it’s easy enough for me to figure out why it was translated like this. It’s another mistake of machine translation. Rather than going through how this should translate, a common way to interpret this is “Please wait outside the one-meter line”, in US English of course.

We know the economy is turbulent, but more and more people have come forward to tell us that they are forced to use machine translation at work. They are being directed to translate everything from everyday internal communications to technical manuals, simply because the budget is low.

Machine translation is free and no doubt you can save in the short run. The danger is without clear communication internally, you will end up spending more time and more energy in clarifying your message and this will ultimately cost your company even more in the long run. Instead, you should focus on doing what’s important to sustain or grow your business.

At SanTranslate, we provide professional translation services at a very competitive price. We have different tariffs and honest pricing to help our clients face the challenge of Global Trading. Click SanTranslate.