Translating Your Message
Most people are only good in 1 language. With globalisation, and due to a “flat world” nowadays, you would need to bring your message across to not only your neighbours next to you, but also all the way down to the Antartic Polar Bears (i.e. if they can even read!)
And what we are most afraid of is that our message gets misinterpreted along the way. Even passing a message from Person A to Person M gets distorted, what more can go wrong when the message is wrongly translated.
Translation is a skill that not many people have. Although we understand several languages, that doesn’t make us the linguists or the expert in communication! Translation calls for both. And you would definitely want the gist of your message to be brought across the cultures.
Good points.
As we move closer to a more globally integrated future, more and more organisations are ensuring that their material is published in languages other than English.
Also, machine translation becomes more and more popular and revisions of the software are always cropping up. Of course, machine translation can never replace a human translator as they all fail to take into account cultural nuances and contexts. The results are often completely useless, though humerous.