Huge Problems Ahead - Fiverr needs to stop automatically translating our gigs

[Guest abourisk]

So I just viewed my gigs from my browser with German settings and was shocked to see that Fiverr translated all my English gig descriptions into German with Google Translate.

In case you don’t know, as a professional translator I can tell you that the quality of these automated translations is very low. This is dangerous because your product description might promises something that you do not offer, simply because the translation is incorrect or potential customers will read your badly worded text and leave because they think you are unprofessional.

I do not understand how Fiverr can think this is a good idea. For the ratings they at least leave them in English AND THEN clients have a button where they can get them automatically translated into their language. That is fine for me. But it is not okay to do it the other way around and first show the terrible translation and then have a tiny button to show the original version.

The correct way to solve this would be:

1. show the English version per default and there will be a button that allows Google Translate to translate the description into the clients’ language.

2. allow us to turn on/off automatic translation for each gig or at least per account. Then everyone can decide for themselves if they want Google Translate.

3. allow us to manually translate our gigs. I speak a few languages and would have no problem running my gigs in several languages. At the moment this is not easily possible.

what is your opinion on this?

[Guest abourisk]

A further issue is that some clients might assume you speak their language and you suddenly will be contacted in a language you don’t even know. It will cause even more communication problems and misunderstandings.

To make the problem more clear, let’s say you are Indian and you have a SEO gig. A German customer (I don’t know which languages they automatically translate into besides German) will view your gig in German because it has been automatically translated. The text will be full of grammar and word order problems, some words cannot be translated, others will have the wrong translation etc. A complete mess. The client can turn off this translation but I’m afraid many people will have left already at that point. It would be a lot better to first show your original English gig and then have an option to get it translated for customers who do not understand English.

[fitrigwrites4u]

I checked out a couple of your gigs, they are in English.

[Guest abourisk]

You don’t get it. If you would access the gigs in Germany with a German browser you would see they have been automatically translated to German.

[fitrigwrites4u]

Yes, I didn´t get it. Misunderstood. Now I think I get it. There is a way to fix it but I forgot how.

[Guest abourisk]

Okay, no problem. I contacted Fiverr Support and they did not know a fix, instead they said they will forward my feedback to the Product Developers. I really hope more people start complaining but I guess most people cannot even view the problem due to their browser etc. being English and not understanding how bad those automated translations actually are.

[fitrigwrites4u]

If Fiverr Support said they cannot fix it, then I misunderstood again, lol.