The lack of a common language is one of the main problems that European Federations face in their day to day work and networking activities.

Not everyone we want to communicate with speaks English…

One way of solving the problem is using a translation service. In the Patient communities, we use Speaklike, a rather cheap and efficient online translation service available to YOUR community now through Eurordis at http://www.eurordis.org/content/rare-disease-online-communities. You can see more at http://www.rarediseasecommunities.org/en or in German (DE), French (FR), Spanish (ES), and Italian (IT).

Another  way of solving the problem is the use of, for example, Google Translate, a free service enabling everyone to read web pages translated into their own language, even though the translations is not always perfect.

What is Google Translate?

Google Translate is a free translation service that provides instant translations between 57 different languages. It can translate words, sentences and web pages between any combination of our supported languages. With Google Translate, we hope to make information universally accessible and useful, regardless of the language in which it’s written.

How does it work?

When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be. This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called “statistical machine translation”. Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation will be perfect. The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyse in a specific language, the better the translation quality will be. This is why translation accuracy will sometimes vary across languages.