.. but offer translated versions of their website/documentation anyway?
why can't you pay a professional to translate your website instead of relying on google translate?
(I actually wanted to say that they don't give two shits but i think that maybe it's not title-appropriate)
for example, fluke 117 (apply to every page in the fluke website)
Display - Digital: 6,000 counts, updates 4 per second
in italian it was translated as "updates every 4 seconds". what the hell!!
i'm not asking for a perfect translation but at least avoid these -grade errors
after all we give it a honest try
and don't get me started on manuals.
I worked at a software company a few years ago, hired as a native English speaker to translate their product, and all other customer-facing text (manual, website, email templates, etc.) from German into English so they could expand beyond German-speaking countries. It's not as trivial as you think. Finding translators is easy; finding
good translators is hard. But the real pickle, which AntiProtonBoy mentioned, is change management. If you change something in one place, you need to update that change throughout all the languages you support. If you're lucky, the company is using a content management system with CAT (computer aided translation)* support. Otherwise, you're sitting there comparing source document versions to find the changes the author made. Oh, and get it done by yesterday. (For sure, once a company goes to the effort of setting up good infrastructure and processes for multilingual text, adding additional languages becomes easier, but the cost for translation remains high.)
Every language you add support for, you're adding delays into product launches, updates, etc. It's often more pragmatic to support a few languages that cover lots of people.
Frankly, most companies have entirely given up on end-user documentation altogether, reducing it to quick-start guides and FAQs. I remember when computers came with 300 page manuals, applications came with 1000 page binders, etc. Documentation is expensive, and most companies seem to have decided that users do just fine without it. (And given how many users categorically refuse to consult documentation anyway, I can't entirely blame them.)
*CAT is not machine translation. CAT tools manage human-generated translations (in "translation memory" and terminology databases) and help a human translator bang out a document translation that is consistent with the company's existing translations. For example, if it knows that in prior documents, you translated "10 inch touchscreen display" into "10-Zoll Touch-Bildschirm", it will suggest that existing translation whenever it encounters that phrase, so you don't create a new translation, like "10 Zoll Touch-Display". The granularity should extend from short phrases to whole sentences, if they are often reused.