Re: Translations

Subject: Re: Translations
From: Joe Malin <jmalin -at- jmalin -dot- com>
To: "Broberg, Mats" <mabr -at- flir -dot- se>
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 10:23:52 -0800

Oh by all means do machine translation if your CEO advises you to do so. Then go join another company, /now/. Cuz your CEO is out of his mind. I wouldn't bother wasting my time and energy either arguing him out of such a bone-headed idea or wasting your career working for a company like that.

The reason that tech writers get burnt out, people still suggest machine translation, and companies have so many problems is that good, smart, moral people continue to work for companies that are no damn good.



Broberg, Mats wrote:

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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References:
Translations: From: bryan johnson
RE: Translations: From: Broberg, Mats

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