Why hire a translator with a background in architecture and a native English speaker as opposed to a generalist translator or agency or non-native speaker with in-depth technical knowledge or machine translation?

You might be considering translating your German website into English, perhaps with some demanding technical content interspersed with descriptions of spatial concepts or ideas about minimising environmental impact.

Or perhaps you are an academic working in scientific or engineering circles and have written an article describing a particular aspect of construction or engineering.

You could be a manufacturer of equipment and hardware for buildings whose products are used in prestigious architecturally sophisticated buildings and want to tell the world about how your products work with the building and do not detract from the design, or better still enhance it.

You might be a publisher writing a feature on a building or an architect who wants to share your work with an international audience.

So is it worth hiring a specialist translator who is also a native English speaker to do this? Or would it work just as well with a generalist whose first language is not English?

The answer is to work with a specialist in your field, for the following reasons: