Many people looking to have their business documents ported to a different dialect often avoid automated translation software. Having little confidence in software’s ability to perform a suitable translation, they prefer to work with expensive human interpreters to do the job.

Truth is, businesses can save a lot of money with a small investment in translation software. Instead of having all their documents worked on by a consultant, they can use the automated software to handle common translation needs, leaving the expensive manual work done for documents that can seriously affect the bottom line.

If you compare manual translations with their automated counterparts, it’s easy to see the difference in quality. Since human translators are capable of a wider range of thought processes, their work will naturally be better. Natural writing can’t be matched by automated solutions. However, peruse them for their ability to communicate the ideas and the overall value will likely be the same.

Modern language translation software no longer use the word-per-word conversions older software used to do. Instead, new algorithms offer pretty advanced features that may surprise you with its quality. For well-written source documents, especially, the translation into any new language can be quite impressive.

Don’t discount translation software based on past experience. They’ve now evolved in massive ways and might prove to be among the most valuable tools you can buy for your organization.

If you’re a website owner, you’re probably aware of services like Babelfish that will translate your website for you, on the fly. We highly recommend that you steer clear of those services for one very simple reason: you lose the potential search engine benefits that translating your website can provide.

SEO is a huge buzzword for website owners, since it essentially defines a huge part of your online ventures’ success. When you translate your website, you open it up to a whole new audience that “searches” using another language. If you got 100 visitors a day on your English website, you could double, triple or even quadruple this amount if you use translations.

When you use online translation services like Babelfish, though, you immediately lose any SEO value. Since it doesn’t create any new actual pages on your site, there’s nothing for the search engines to index. If they do index anything, it will be under the Babelfish domain, instead of your site. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why Babelfish’s ranking grows even larger – they’re essentially duping webmasters into making more pages for their benefit!

Using a language translation software, on the other hand, allows you to create a new version of each page on your website with just one click. Sure, it will require a bit more time (especially if you have thousands of pages). However, the benefits are totally worth any extra work. Since you’re creating new pages in another language, the search engines will identify it as fresh content and treat it as such.