The automated translation is a disaster for sellers

[mariokluser]

Two days ago I complained about the fact that it is annoying that Fiverr decides for me that I want to see everything in Dutch as soon as I visit the website. Apart from this being annoying I realize that the automatic translation that comes with the whole thing can be a disaster for sellers.

If I don’t change the translation back to English and browse through the gigs I see unbelievable bad translated gig descriptions due to the automated translation. A new visitor will not realize that and will have the impression that only retards are offering gigs.
This can especially be a bummer for people who do translation gigs and have their gig descriptions in English. The first impression counts and if a new visitor and potential buyer sees a total crap description it is very unlikely that he/she wil order.

I really hope that Fiverr removes this shitty option there will be people who will see a drop in sales because of that.

[eoinfinnegan]

Wow, that is pretty bad! Why do they use automatic translation, it seems ridiculous. If a website can just use that, why do translators exist? It will definitely have an effect on translators if their description looks rubbish. That said, it doesn’t seem like Fiverr cares too much about the appearance and readability of texts, some of the grammar in the emails they send out is shameful for a professional company!

[misscrystal]

I’ve seen websites that do perfect translations. Maybe they could change to a different translation service.

[mariokluser]

It’s not just for translators. Also for all the other services. I see gig that are literally translated like “I move your WP website” into “Ik beweeg u WP website” what actually should be “Ik verhuis u WP website”. It just makes totally no sense at all.

[misscrystal]

I have 59 sales from Netherlands so they must understand it somehow.

[Guest addsubscribers]

why use translation lol all buyers or sellers use eng !!

[mariokluser]

This says nothing as they just implemented last week that the language setting of the page follows the ip-range of the country. Thus everything is in that language and you have to change it in the footer to change it back to English. New visitors are very likely to overlook this and will be surprised by the weird use of language in the gigs.
The only work around is after setting the language to English not to delete the cookies from Fiverr.

[maartenvs]

Totally agree, the translations are horrible. Sure If you really try you understand what is probably meant by the text but I would prefer to see English only as a standard.

[misscrystal]

Tell all this to customer service. We must let them know!

[eoinfinnegan]

I was curious about what you said here so I checked through my orders. I usually get a lot of work from central Europe, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and eastern Europe. My last order from a new client from any of those countries was at the end of January. I then was on vacation mode for 7 days or so and started back to work about 8 or 9 days ago. I have not had one order from Europe that was a new client in that time, all have been regular clients. I have had orders from the US, Canada and Australia and Asia so I am definitely showing up in results. I wonder if this is related to the badly translated gigs!
This is quite worrying and I will be contacting CS to see what they have to say. I’ll let you know.

[emmaki]

Is this to say that individual gigs are being automatically/horribly translated from English into certain languages? That’s really going to work out when a seller with poor English skills and multiple mistakes has their gigs translated into an even bigger mess. Even perfectly written English is going to fall short with the quirks between languages.

Wouldn’t this also lead to some issues where buyers might, for some reason, assume the seller automatically speaks the other language? That’s a pretty easy way to confuse and irritate a new buyer and rapidly build chances of a bad review vis-a-vis communication…

Having the TOS and other boilerplate information professionally translated into other languages would be a good idea, as it’ll help those to learn how the site works a lot more comfortably (if they can be bothered!), but just kicking everything through Google Translate or whatever seems like a bad idea.

I mean, sure, you see those websites where they have a GT translate option where you can manually click it to translate from X to Y, but the user is automatically aware that the translation won’t be great. In this case, I’m seeing ishoos everywhere. And hiding the language option at the bottom is just bad UI! It should be in the top right hand corner where the profile is!

[misscrystal]

I agree that it should be in the top right hand corner and be optional.

[mariokluser]

The titles are translated automatically and the visitor can then click on top of the gig description a link to translate it. The result is just wrong. Just as you use Google translate and keep everything that it spits out. The worst is the title. If I for example take your first gig and translate it back to English the title says: I shall translate and rewrite from your document as an English speaker.
This is how weak it is translated into Dutch.

[mariokluser]

All of your titles are terrible translated into Dutch. If I hit the banner above the description to translate it into Dutch I get very funny results. Literally translated via Google translate.
At least the whole thing will make the Dutch people laugh.

[mariokluser]

I guess these sites are static and not dynamic as Fiverr is. So the individual texts as translated by a human being beforehand.

[graphic_wiz]

Thank you @mariokluser very useful tips

[emmaki]

I’d expect that–I’m using idiomatic English in a lot of them, and they simply won’t translate mechanically…

[eoinfinnegan]

Hopefully the all Dutch people are as good at cracking codes as you are!

[mariokluser]

They aren’t.

[mariokluser]

Thank you for your kind words, but we all could be more grateful if the Fiverr staff turns everything back to as it was as soon as possible.