Proofread Machine Translations To Avoid Muprhy’s Law

I want to share with you a real life example of the cruel Muprhy’s law. Like I wrote in a previous post, proofreading and it’s importance should be taken seriously. While Murphy’s law says that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, Muprhy’s law states that everything that can be written wrong will be written wrong – especially if you write about proofreading.

One of the latest victim of this ruthless law is Adam Wooten. His article about importance of good brand translations in foreign markets in a business magazine had missed the final proofreading with some unwanted consequences. In this case the author can’t be blamed for the mistake because the last modifications were made by the magazine staff. No matter who’s to fault, Adam Wooten was very disappointed about the issue. I won’t go to the details but you can read his somewhat bitter statement in its entirety here.

This case illustrates once again how important it is to proofread translations. We have discussed about machine translators many times in this blog. Although we are encouraging people to try automatic translations to save time and money, we are also talking about the fact that machine can’t meet the translation quality of professional human translator. Furthermore it is important to highlight that machine translation is a fast access to a huge amount of information written in foreign languages. Machine translation is an effective tool for the right places.

Are we just too lazy to do the final proofreading?