There are a few issues that should be highlighted, especially when it comes to translation accuracy and transparency.
In this video, as an experienced Haitian Creole translator, I will evaluate the accuracy of the English to Haitian Creole translation services offered by ImTranslator, a free online tool translation.
I used three basic sentences to test the machine translation offered by ImTranslator, which seems to operate as an aggregator of online translation tools as they offered translation using both Google Translate and Microsoft Translate.
I point out the errors in the translation offered by ImTranslator and I also emphasize the transparency issue on their website.
For example, when I wrote “…someone was watching me”, ImTranslator translated it as “..yon te gade m ‘”. This translation is not fully accurate because the idea of the past progressive is not fully conveyed. ImTranslator only translated the past tense. In Haitian Creole the proper translation for “…someone was watching me” is “…moun t ap gade m” and there is no need for the “apostrophe” sign.
Keep in mind that these are very basic sentences.
I also want to point out this other issue: ImTranslator claims that their “online translation service powered by various machine translation engines”.
In the video, they offer the Google Translate machine translation engine. But the version they have is not updated because I translated the same sentences on Google and Google offered a slightly different (and better) version.
ImTranslator has a disclaimer about the quality/accuracy of the translations they offer.
Here’s what the ImTranslator disclaimer says “Translation by ImTranslator can produce reasonable results in most cases, although the quality of the machine translation cannot be compared to the translations delivered by the professional translation services.”
But the disclaimer is buried all the way at the bottom of their page where the unsuspecting website visitor might not see it.
Here’s the video where I talk about the issues to be encountered while using ImTranslator to translate your text from English to Haitian Creole.