“We use Google Translate just about every day, for different purposes.”

My business partner and I own and run a small used car dealership in Finland. I’m very good with English, I speak it every day, both at home and with customers at work. As for other languages, I took Swedish and German in school because I had to. I remember some things of both languages though I couldn’t really use them to converse with another person. Nowadays we need to deal with information in those languages on a regular basis.

We buy cars from Germany and Sweden and can take care of most of the dealing over the internet: we search for cars in an internet database, decide on which ones interest us, make offers, then arrange for transport, all entirely online. The first, very short descriptions of the cars are often in Finnish since the database’s interface is translated, but attached to each is also a 2-page detailed technical report which is written by a car inspector in the respective countries. These reports are filled with technical terms and it’s extremely important that we understand certain parts of them – the paragraphs that describe the condition and possible problems with each car.  Here’s an example, in which the heading INFORMATION FROM TEST DRIVE (coming from the software application) is in Finnish, but the excerpt of the report is in German:

We copy/paste those parts into Google Translate to get a translation into Finnish:

If you are among that small percentage of the world’s population that doesn’t know Finnish, here is the same in English:

As you can see in these examples, parts of the text are translated nearly perfectly. Other parts are not as good. Between what Google gives us and what we remember of our school Swedish and German, we usually figure out what we need to know.

From time to time we also buy car parts from different parts of Europe through eBay. Since we are searching for very specific parts, we just punch in the part number and have no problem locating the products. But we often need to machine translate information on payments and delivery. We use Google Translate for that too.

Normally we translate from Swedish and German into our own language of Finnish. Generally we are confident that the translations are good enough to base decisions on. It’s rare that we have to resort to an English translation because the one into Finnish isn’t good enough.

The decisions we make on car parts involve relatively small sums, but when we’re buying cars, we are making 10 000€ – 20 000€ decisions which are based, in part, on machine translated information. Of course there is some risk involved but we are car dealers – risk is what we do!

How did we come up with the idea of using Google Translate? Everyone does Google! We started using it 3 years ago. We had a need to get some kind of idea on information in another language quickly and that was the fastest way to do it.

If we couldn’t use machine translation for this, it would slow down our operations.