rushtranslate.com

Good service design, but my translator cut corners

The overall service design is great: quick turnaround time, streamlined system for requesting revisions, and a very important review system enabling RushTranslate to evaluate the translation quality of their individual translators.Unfortunately, in this case the translator seems to have "cut corners". Specifically, it appears that they used Google Translate as the "base" for their translation, and only edited it to "smooth out" the parts of the translation that didn't sound natural enough (about half of the sentences are exact matches with the Google Translate result, for sentences that you can tell a human would translate differently, ie. with more natural phrasing).Also, there were a couple of flat-out grammar mistakes, as in: "One often forgets that the exceptionally is first separated from the non-real after examination and clarification of the nature of the phenomenon." (Exceptionally is not a noun, and I doubt it's the right word anyway -- I assume it would be "real", given that it's being contrasted with "non-real".)While for some use-cases, the approach above ("start with a machine translation, then have a human refine it") could work fine, it is not what one would expect from a professional translator. My suggestion is that if a company is going to allow it, they should explicitly let the customer choose whether this is acceptable, at a reduced cost. This allows for cheaper/faster translations for customers that don't need the highest quality, while maintaining full quality/organicness for formal documents that require it.From what I understand, RushTranslate intends for its translators to not use machines for the translation base, so by that criteria the issue would just be the particular translator that was assigned to my order. I hope that they can thus contact the translator and confirm whether Google Translate was used. (or perhaps evaluate it for themselves by comparing the translator's provided result with that seen from Google Translate)Anyway, the result was not satisfactory in my case, but the overall service seems well thought out, so I will give it a mixed review. While I will use another service for my next translation, I think RushTranslate has promise, if they can do a better job of preventing their translators from "cutting corners" through use of machine translation tools and the like. (perhaps by having a system automatically compare the "human translation" with Google Translate's, and having it reviewed by management before being sent out, in cases where the results are suspiciously similar)Update: As of today (the next day), my order was refunded due to my concerns about the translation quality. This makes me want to up the rating by one, since this is good customer service (and maybe the translation quality was unrepresentative). However, I'm conflicted because I notice that my on-site submitted review is still not visible in the reviews section on their website (despite others from that day, as well as the next, being shown). This makes me think that in cases where they refund the customer, they don't show the review on-site. On the one hand, I can understand this (ie. unfair for them to take a rating hit even after they've fully refunded/resolved the occasional cases of translators cutting corners), but on the other hand, it can skew a customer's perception of how reliable their translators are (which can be important for time-sensitive tasks). Thus, I will have to leave my rating at 2-stars: they gain one for the good customer service, but lose one for the (somewhat) understandable but confusing practice of apparently not publishing the on-site reviews for translation orders that were canceled/refunded.

Date of experience: Mar 14, 2021