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Subject:English to Japanese Machine Translation? From:Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Mon, 01 Aug 2005 08:41:29 -0400
Nina Panzica wondered: <<Has anybody used these programs much and is
there one you'd recommend over others? Need to try to find something
better than or that complements SYSTRAN. It will be used by a
non-Japanese speaker to make automatic translations of technical
documents.>>
No offence, but think how you would respond if I asked you the
following question: "I don't know how to write, and thus, Word will not
meet my needs. Would FrameMaker do the writing automatically for me?"
I'm not saying that to insult you, but rather to illustrate (with
slight exaggeration) the kind of question you're asking.
Current automatic translation technology works very poorly unless it's
used by (a) someone familiar with the potential and limitations of the
technology and (b) someone who knows a bit about both languages and (c)
someone who has experience as a translator. For someone who meets these
criteria, the technology a godsend and an enormous productivity
booster, but for someone who doesn't meet any of these criteria, it's
potentially an expensive time waster and a danger to the reader.
There is a large exception to this negative view: If you have already
developed a translation memory database that holds proven translations
of a large set of standard phrases (the majority of what you'll be
translating), and the original-language authors have used these phrases
with near-perfect consistency and have had their writing carefully
edited for clarity and simplicity, then it's possible for someone who
does not meet one or more of these criteria to produce a credible first
draft that a skilled (preferably bilingual) editor can turn into
something useful.
But the bottom line really is the following: If you want to do
translation, hire a translator. This is not work that "anyone" can do,
and it takes both training and experience to do it well enough that
your company won't be embarassed by the results. If you're in a
business where poor translations can cost lives or dollars, sparing the
expense of a professional is a false economy, and possibly unethical
too. At best, you're asking for people to post mocking quotations of
your translations for all to admire.
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