Comment by QuercusMax
15 hours ago
I remember one time when I had written a bunch of user facing text for an imaging app and was reviewing our French translation. I don't speak French but I was pretty sure "plane" (as in geometry) shouldn't be translated as "avion". And this was human translated!
You'd be surprised how shoddy human translations can be, and it's not necessarily because of the translators themselves.
Typically what happens is that translators are given an Excel sheet with the original text in a column, and the translated text must be put into the next column. Because there's no context, it's not necessarily clear to the translator whether the translation for plane should be avion (airplane) or plan (geometric plane). The translator might not ever see the actual software with their translated text.