If you receive documents from overseas customers or suppliers and you need to translate text into English, have you used Google Translate?

It’s a free, but incredibly powerful facility.

You can select to translate:

• Individual blocks of text that you add to view in alternate languages.
• Images with text.
• Documents.
• And really useful, websites. Use this to view overseas sites in English or an English site in a non-English language.

Especially useful if you need to translate contracts to ensure you fully understand terms and conditions.

And if you are courting an overseas customer use this facility to generate your website into a local language and then send the translated link to your customer. Alternatively, add links to your website so casual overseas visitors can see your site in a local language.

But beware, before taking commercial decisions based on Google Translate translations, best to have the translated copy proof-read by a local advisor to make sure there are no ambiguities. Similarly, have a translated websites read by a fluent person to reveal any errors in translation.

Google’s own reply to the question – ‘Is Google Translate reliable?’ is:

Since its inception in 2006, it has become one of the top-rated machine translation (MT) tools, currently supporting 133 languages, having added 24 in 2022. Accuracy varies depending on language pair and content type, though some reports show Google Translate reaching 94% accuracy.