river_thompson•12d agoProlific Poster

That $40 translation plug-in I bought burned me hard on a Spanish contract

I grabbed this cheap translation plug-in for my invoicing software thinking it would save me time talking to a client in Mexico City. Cost me $40 and I thought it was a steal. Turns out it kept swapping words like "payment" for "agreement" and the client got confused when I sent them a quote. They called me out on it and I looked like a total amateur. I spent way more than $40 in lost trust and had to redo everything with a real translator. Now I just pay a human $80 per document and it's way smoother. Anyone else get burned by cheap translation tools for international work?

3 comments

3 Comments

kim_mason5511d ago

Did you try any of the free options first? I almost made the same mistake with a French contract. A buddy told me to use DeepL for quick drafts and then hire a real translator to check it. Only cost me $50 for the human check. Saved my butt when the machine got "deadline" and "deadline extension" completely backwards. That phrase alone would have cost me a week of delays. Now I split the work every time. Machine for the rough copy, human to fix the tone and legal words.

kim_mason5511d ago

That's a smart strategy and I've heard a lot of people doing the same thing now. The machine-rough-draft plus human-polish method really seems to be the sweet spot between cost and accuracy. Glad it worked out for you with that French contract, those legal terms can get messy fast.

sullivan.quinn11d ago

$40 is rough but honestly that lost trust part is what gets you the worst. I totally get it - I had a similar thing happen with a Spanish contract for a small renovation job in Colombia. The plug-in swapped "material costs" with "labor costs" and I almost ended up paying for supplies out of my own pocket. It's crazy how one little word flip can make you look like you don't know what you're doing. I've learned the hard way that saving a few bucks upfront just costs way more in the long run when you have to fix the mess and apologize to clients.