Re: Translations... dogma or realism?

[Max Wyss <prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch>]

Geoff,

you know it, I know it, I guess even Susan knows it, but the big
problem is that the "general purpose machine translation system"
marketroids make (the beancounters) believe that their product does
it, and that there is no more need to waste money on _translators_.
And then, they want everything done with such systems, and don't get
the point that there is more in translation than just replacing words
or phrases.

Another Zweiräppler....



Max Wyss
PRODOK Engineering
Low Paper workflows, Smart documents, PDF forms
CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland

Fax:  +41 1 700 20 37
e-mail:  mailto:prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch
http://www.prodok.ch



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Excellent points. Plus, nobody in their right mind uses machine translation
to produce a final draft that won't be revised by humans. Such tools are a
godsend to busy translators; I've cut my translation times by more than half
simply by using a huge search and replace macro that I built in Word. The
results are occasionally about as nonsensical as you'd expect, but I'm aware
of that and use the macros solely to cut my typing time, not to do the hard
work for me. Once I've gotten the bulk of the nouns replaced (and many of
the verbs), the largely mechanical labor is over. What remains is what
fascinates me about translation: understanding what the author was trying to
say in French, and making the same message clear in English. All I need to
do most of the time is clean things up and turning them into more colloquial
English. I'd be lost without the technology--or I'd have to hire someone
else to handle the workload, robbing me of work that I really enjoy.