Experience with using Professional Translation

Hello everyone. About a month ago I posted seeking advice about using human translation rather than machine. I wanted to give my impression after trying it. First, it dramatically helped us understand each other and have real conversations rather than just exchanging questionnaires. I experimented by running her letters written in Russian through the machine translators and comparing the results with the human translation. Sometimes the differences were dramatic in tone and meaning. Apparently Russian has multiple negative words or phrases that look very bad when translated individually but when combined by a human translator have a very different meaning. If you’re a native English speaker this is important to remember or you might feel your being attacked or that she is even angry when it’s not the case (if using machine translation only). We found that we really had a lot of things in common and will be meeting soon in Russia. This is great, but obviously there are downsides too. The biggest is cost. The least expensive service we found was .06 cents per word. This seems very reasonable at first. There’s a problem though that’s obvious now. The better you understand each other, the more you write! Hahaha. It opens the floodgates and letters of 1000 words quickly become common. So the costs add up quickly. The next thing is that it doesn’t solve all problems. Even with perfect translation, misunderstandings are still very possible because of real cultural differences. Simply understanding the words isn’t enough. We’ve both started lessons to learn each other’s language but it will be slow. So, should you try it? Unfortunately there’s not a clear answer unless you are wealthy enough that cost doesn’t matter. For me, I have no regrets, we are now friends and know we like each other. And we are still using the service. For us, it was worth the cost. I was lucky though, I found a real connection the first time. You can easily do this many times before you find someone who seems compatible enough that you want to meet. Good luck to everyone.