RE: Translations

["Broberg, Mats" <mabr -at- flir -dot- se>]

Bryan,

As many of the others have responded - be very careful with machine
translations. 

Even for Caterpillar, who has always been on the forefront of
translation & documentation technologies and invested $$$$ in developing
a controlled source language and embarked on various research projects
with Carnegie Mellon University, post-editing is necessary.

http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/Research/Kant/

http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/Research/Kant/kantoo-overview.html


Best regards,
Mats Broberg
Technical Documentation Manager

www.flirthermography.com


Bryan Johnson wrote:

> I'm hoping someone out there can help me...
> 
> My current employer has a need to translate some of our 
> documents (FM) to Spanish (LA) and French (Canada). Many of 
> our customers are asking/demanding our manuals be translated. 
> I have investigated various translation services etc. and 
> have together with our VP of International sales, proposed a 
> plan to recoup our translation costs. Everything looks good...
> 
> We presented our plan to our CEO who promptly shot it down 
> saying he wouldn't approve the plan but would approve 
> "software" to do the translations...
> 
> Okay, aside from all of the obvious problems with this 
> scenario, how can I go about educating him on the short 
> comings of machine translation? Has anyone been down this road before?
> 
> Even if there was a "magic" box that could produce accurate 
> translations at the touch of a button, we would still need to 
> perform the desktop publishing. We are a small (2 writers) 
> mono-lingual group. We currently don't even have the 
> resources to produce our documentation in English! Let alone 
> perform translation services! 
> 
> Sorry, trying hard not to vent!
> 
> Anyway, I was hoping there might be white papers, reports, 
> speeches... anything that I can produce from an authority, 
> that will back up my contention that this is a really, really 
> bad idea.
> 
> thanks! 
> 
> Bryan
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