This award-winning comedian and host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central wrote a book about growing up in poverty in South Africa under the shadow of Apartheid. I recently had the opportunity to read Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. You may be thinking that taglines are pretty specialized, so it makes sense that they benefit from human translation, but what about other text? How does Google Translate do with everyday language? The Limits of Google Translate

Jinba (the current translation as of this moment)įortunately, the marketing team at Mazda researched the best way to adapt their tagline for the US: human translation.

The “oneness of horse and rider” translated to the following: On three separate occasions, I put “Jinba Ittai” into Google Translate to see what it would come up with. Had their marketing department used Google Translate to convert their tagline to English, they would have sent a much different message to their US customers.

Yet in Japan, that company’s tagline is “Jinbai Ittai.” This phrase captures the feeling of a horseman warrior, riding across the plains totally in sync with his horse, or “the oneness of horse and rider.” Mazda wanted the tagline to evoke the energy and passion you feel when you drive their cars.

In the United States, a tagline like “Driving Matters!” brings the popular car company Mazda to mind.

Japan to english google translate