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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.
>
> 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.
>
> I found a program called LogoMedia that looks pretty good. Has anyone had
> experience with that, or have any other ideas to offer?
From: Bill <technicoid -at- cableone -dot- net> replied 16 Apr 2004
> 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.
>
> 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.
From: Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com> 16 Apr 2004 replied:
> I don't have any experience with that program, but I've tinkered with
> translation programs here and there (bable fish was one of them but that
> was a while ago). My experience has been that these translation programs
> aren't very good. Your translator should be translating the docs, not just
> editing them. Will he be reading the English version before putting the docs
> through translation software? If not, you could end up with some pretty
strange
> information that might be grammatical, but be odd or simply wrong.
Sorry my late reply. I've been on a few trips lately with restricted e-mail
access.
Lisa, you should look up your colleague Frank Brewer who did a lot of
investigation into MT in the mid-to-late 1990s.
A significant amount of informative information, from basic to very technical,
is available for free at my Machine Translation web page, accessible via my web
site (http://www.geocities.com/jeffallenpubs/). Some of these papers and
discussion threads explain the types of translation approaches and the software
tools (online web, packaged software, and custom systems) that correspond to
those approaches. There are also several complete MT software reviews at that
site.
I have agreed to give tutorials at the AMTA2004 conference in Sept 2004 in
Washington DC: one giving a summary of writing principles for improving MT
translation output and one on improving MT output and working with it
(including an intro on how MT systems process info, building custom MT
dictionaries and performing MT postediting -- how to correct MT output -- by
using a few different commercial MT systems).
Hope that helps.
Jeff
********************************************************
Jeff Allen
Advisory Board
MultiLingual Computing & Technology magazine
jeff -at- multilingual -dot- com or jeff -dot- allen -at- free -dot- fr http://www.geocities.com/jeffallenpubs/
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