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Subject:RE: translation tool question From:Maritza van den Heuvel <MaritzaV -at- stt-global -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 10 May 2004 10:47:44 +0200
Maritza: I agree whole-heartedly with everything that's been said about the
appropriate use of services like Babelfish and MT in general. And yes,
there's a lot of research on the Internet that covers the issues involved.
In particular, there's an article by Sylvia Wong that introduces the
techniques of Machine Translation that I've used very effectively to teach
the principles of MT to students of linguistics at post-graduate level. Good
introductory, lay person kind of stuff. Here's the link:
The one comment I do wish to add, though, concerns MAT/CAT
(Machine-/Computer-Assisted Translation). There are numerous translation
memory tools on the market that support a variety of authoring formats and
that provide what is, to me at least, the most feasible approach to
integrating MT with human translation. MT research and techniques still have
a very, very long way to go before they will be truly useful for commercial
translation purposes, and translation memory (where you build up a database
of previously translated documents), is probably the closest you're going to
get for now. To start with, have a look at Trados and Déjà Vu, also
About the workflow being used to edit the PDF's - that's generally not a
good idea. Modifying the published/exported end-product of any
document/image should be avoided, if possible. Rather work from the source
file where posssible, or create duplicates of the source files that can be a
separate language stream alongside the original - at least that way the
language streams are in synch and republishing/re-exporting the source won't
always mean having to redo the whole PDF in the other language(s).
FWIW.
Maritza van den Heuvel
Technical Writer
-------------------------------------------------------
Software Training Technology (Pty) Limited http://www.stt-global.com
> 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).
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