“…just because someone in a company understands how to avoid the risks of producing bad translation does not mean everyone in a company does. Someone else — someone whose job description is not even supposed to include translation — may not know it is inappropriate to run your marketing collateral through a free online translator. Even the U.S. State Department, home to some of the world’s most admired teams of translators and interpreters, has suffered terrible public embarrassment when people outside its language departments have mistakenly decided to produce their own unprofessional translations.”

As further explained in the article “Irony: Magazine mistakenly adds Google mistranslation to article about translation,” this point was made very clear when an unauthorized individual in a magazine’s art department added mistranslated graphics to an article about translation quality.  Even more ironically, that article specifically warned against misusing machine translation. Caterpillar has also been the victim of a similarly “helpful” magazine art department.