Translations

["bryan johnson" <bryan -dot- johnson -at- motoman -dot- com>]

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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