Talk:Translation: Determining what service you need and what it will cost
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Let's not start with automatic translation, even saying that it may be appropriate for informational purposes. MT may have its place, but starting with it give the impression that this is the irst choice one should consider. I would place any discussion of machine translation much further down, after exploring the range of options offered by human translation.
Is the "Accounting" category appropriate? Accounting seems a misleading category for this article. I would consider it more appropriate to categorize it under something like "Business practices"
unspecified quality? This does not cover specified low/bad quality. What about unguaranteed quality or similar
Since the quality of a translation largely depends on the subjective views of translator and proofreader, a high quality translation can only be guaranteed by a close feedback and discussion loop between the proofreader and translator. For all other kinds of "guarantee" it would be too late at the deadline.
In support of Talk#1: This is definitely not the right place to suggest "Machine translation" before potential buyers even get to learn about human translation, and may at worst mislead buyers to choose this cheap alternative, thus undermining the industry! If buyers believe MT to be an option they can find out all about it for themselves. Suggesting to remove the entire MT section!!
I also thought the MT section was potentially misleading in that it presented it as a viable option. I would suggest using stronger language to warn readers of the dangers of using free automatic translation, perhaps with some examples of back-translation to illustrate the risk of distortion.
I agree that the options should be presented in the other order, because
a) The first option should be the one you want to sell most.
b) Reading from high to low quality will increase the fear of poor quality with each step, which helps the outsourcer to chose the highest affordable quality.
c) It corresponds to the natural order of negotiaton: "What? It would be that much expensive?" "You can get an online machine translation for free, but you will be lucky if it will be understandable."
