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Comment by CoreDumpling | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has worked with many incompetent translators and often had to completely redo their jobs, I'm a bit surprised that you're willing to risk getting total crap from these random people. Perhaps this isn't a problem for you if you are getting very low-value articles translated, but I don't see how this scales to "real" translation jobs.

A good translator will proofread his/her work and make sure everything is covered. They will ask you when they need clarification instead of skipping over a passage or assuming they understand it (their assumptions very often being way off base). Unfortunately, I've worked with plenty who are simply out to make a quick buck, hoping that whoever is paying them doesn't actually know the language and won't bother to check.

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The real trouble with bad translations is that, often, you don't even KNOW if it's bad. Reputation goes a long way in this case.

... you may end up with your document saying "I translated some text for a second life guy and all I got was 50 Linden $." ;)

I've even had trouble when I asked someone else to review the translation work. Sometimes these people have a tendency to want to justify the cost of hiring them, so they will go through the document correcting irrelevant "mistakes" and otherwise try to prove themselves smarter than the original translator. In fact, I've had a few who made the translated work demonstrably worse.

Are you sure they were really "worse"? There are people who come from different backgrounds, who will feel different things are better... I've seen some translations and even though they were done by natives into my native language, I would change something, because they just didn't feel "right" for some reasons.

Just ask a person from UK, US and Australia to translate some text into English. You're likely to end up with 3 completely different versions. The same thing will happen with different regions in the same country. For one person a sentence will be ok, for another it's something they'd never say, and for you it will look like an "irrelevant mistake".

Aside from the ones that took something that was correct and turned it into something blatantly wrong, you do raise an interesting point. However, I'd maintain that if you end up with linguistic inconsistencies and it's affecting your bottom line, then that's "worse" in my book.

I've learned that it must be made clear to the translator exactly what the target audience expects (I've had to tell British translators to use U.S. spellings, mainland Chinese to use terminology that's specific to Taiwan, etc.). The most experienced ones know of these distinctions and make sure to observe them. The ones who don't (or can't) are better reserved for the jobs that are matched with their background.

Three letters - LQA. You find another translator to a given language and let him/her proofread the translation.

You do QA in another fields, why the translation should be different?

I've done similar jobs using Amazon's Mechanical Turk and I find the best way to do it is to have multiple people work on the project and then have a local person compare the output and decide on which translation to accept. It's seriously inefficient but as the article states there's a huge price advantage to outsourcing which makes it possible to have several different people do a job and still save a significant amount of money

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