Just thought I’d let you know:
I was browsing through LinkedIn when something caught my eye: one of those ads you often see on Facebook posts where someone is offering to lend you money.
I bet you’ve come across one of these scams before. Someone says they’ll lend you money, you send them a few bucks to pay for “account expenses” and you never hear back from them. This is common on Facebook, but LinkedIn? I had never seen one there before. Maybe it was genuine… I was curious.
Curious old me couldn’t help but check out their website. They were offering really good interest rates on several kinds of loans, from hundreds of thousands to invest in real estate, to simple hundreds for you to buy a mobile phone that perhaps you shouldn’t. It was an amazing website, very well constructed. They had a map with their offices and forms to fill in. This one was flying just below my scam radar.
Perhaps with the growing real estate market in Portugal, some American bank wanted to try its luck. I was almost convinced when I noticed they didn’t have a phone number. I’ve always been wary of companies that don’t have a number to call. How am I supposed to contact them if I need quick info? Well, I was doing my best to find flaws, but maybe they just didn’t want to waste money on phone support, like many other companies do.
Then I thought: if their post ended up on my LinkedIn, then they must have targeted Portugal for advertising and, if so, their website needed to be in Portuguese (leads, leads everywhere!) My eyes darted to the top right-hand corner of the page, and there it was: the Portuguese flag.
Behind the Portuguese flag was a translation that would give Google goose bumps. Half Portuguese, half English, it was terrible. Some sentences were completely unfathomable, and I had to go back to the EN version to find out what they were supposed to be saying. It gave me mixed feelings: on the one hand, my lead might be back, but on the other, it made me doubt the legitimacy of the website. Surely no bank would present such poor quality.
The thing is, it’s not hard to create a stunning website on one of the several online platforms available, but translating it is another matter. When translating a website, a translator has to deal with technical terminology, sentence structure, product technical terms, marketing and even SEO. Even the most advanced automatic translation algorithms can’t live up to all this, and the only way around it is human, specialised translation.
The bank’s website was clearly translated by an algorithm, and a very bad one at that. This revealed that whoever was behind the website had probably spent all their money on the domain and was trying their luck with the translation, totally disregarding it. It couldn’t have been a bank, because, as I said before, banks want their clients’ trust, and communicating in their mother tongue is something they don’t usually neglect.
I decided not to contact them. There was a high probability that the website was fake, and the bad translation made me think it wasn’t worth my time. My lead was gone.
However, my curiosity had reached a new level. Was a bank really capable of such a linguistic atrocity? Anyway, I bookmarked their webpage and forgot about it. A week later, while reading the morning newspaper (not on paper, obviously), a headline caught my attention: “Fake website that claims to lend money, has no license and is shut down by police under suspicion of fraud”. There it was, the same link I had bookmarked. I tried visiting the website and it had, indeed, been shut down.
This goes to show two things: a) the impact of a bad translation. In this case, some who wanted to offer a service, myself included, were discouraged because of the untrustworthy, poor quality of the translation. The same probably happened with many other clients who wanted to make use of their “services”. And b) that if you ever want to establish trust, be sure to leave your website translation to professional linguists and avoid algorithms.
I wonder if they actually managed to scam anyone…