Blog post: Who needs translations anyway?

3 February 2025

"Why do we need translations? Everyone speaks English."

I hear this far too often.

First of all: not "everyone" speaks English. There are plenty of people who don't speak English or who don't speak it well enough to communicate effectively.

Second of all, and probably the biggest flaw in this statement: a lot of the people who claim to be "fluent" in English grossly overestimate their skills. They may feel comfortable having a conversation in English or reading English novels, but how good are their conversational skills and do they really understand everything they read?

Of course, if the aim is to just have casual conversations or to get by while visiting an English-speaking country, or to just read a story, their skills may be more than sufficient. However, in many cases people who think they are "fluent" are not able to understand more official or specialised language, often without even realising it. This is called the Dunner-Kruger effect: "a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities". In other words: people think they are able to perfectly understand English and think they don't need a translation, but in reality they don't understand it well enough.

Could machine translation or AI help in these cases? Not really, because regardless of what Big Tech is trying to make us believe, automatic translation is still far from perfect, simply because technology doesn't understand language and doesn't know how to translate. All it does is assemble sentences based on algorithms. And yes, it does that rather well, and it often sounds good too, but is it correct?

To be able to judge whether an automatic translation is correct, you need to understand the source language perfectly, in all its nuances, idioms, and variations. And these are exactly the skills someone who relies on automatic translation usually doesn't have, often without even realising it.

So the answer to the question "Who needs translations anyway?" is: not everyone in every single situation, but more people in more situations than you would think. If the information is crucial, if you are addressing a wide audience with very diverse backgrounds, or if you simply want to come across as professional, translation is crucial. Real translation, not automatic translation.