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>We have a sister company in Taiwan that is going to do the translation of
>one of our instruction manuals into Traditional Chinese. Another sister
>company, this one in Shanghai, has been doing translations in Simplified
>Chinese for a couple of years. They take our PDF files created from
>FrameMaker documents and replace the English text with Simplified Chinese.
>Really.
Wow. That's a laborious way to do it. Are you sure they don't just translate the Frame files? It
would be much easier. There are several translation memory tools that support Frame.
>The man doing this for the Taiwan office wants to find a machine
>translation tool to do the primary translation, which he would then
>proofread, rather than translating the whole manual, manually. I had given
>him the link to babelfish.altavista.com, but he'd like something that will
>process the whole document, without him having to cut and paste between
>programs.
Unless you want truly horrible translations, I don't recommend this approach. First, machine-
translation utilities like Babelfish (as implemented on the Web) are good for "gisting" only
(that is, getting the gist of what a Web page is about). They make numerous errors because they
have little or no means for handling words in various contexts. Second, decent machine-
translation efforts require extensive work to produce glossaries, and most efforts of which I'm
aware have industry-specific glossaries. Machine translation is simply not something you can do
in an ad-hoc manner.
I recommend you research some of the theory behind MT before you start picking out tools. It'll
give you a better idea of the practical limitations of the technology.
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