Re: English to Spanish Translation Software: Caveat

[Tomohiro Hori <thori001 -at- ACS -dot- BU -dot- EDU>]

Hi,

I think it depends on the quality of the work you want.
You just can't compare machine translation to human translation
because these are two totally different things.

Machine translation may be quite useful if you want to quickly grasp
the contents of documents written in foreign language, without costing
time and money. An expert reader will ignore minor errors and guess
true meanings of mistranslated words.

But I think the machine-translated documents needs to be completely
re-written if you want use them outside of your office.
(It's embarrasing) Also, quality of the source documents is crutial.
Remember, 'Garbage in, garabage out.'

By the way, AM I writing English *readable enough*?  :-)

At  8:07 AM 10/4/95 -0400, Lee Bumgarner wrote:
>Techwhirlers:

>A caution from David Dvorkin about English to Spanish translation
>software:

> >Translation software is a waste of time and money.  Your friend
> >will be better off using a professional translator.
> >
> >My wife is co-owner of a translation agency, but that's honestly
> >not why I'm telling you this.  Colleagues of hers report being
> >hired to "clean up" translations that were done by software.  The
> >clean up always ends up as a complete translation from scratch,
> >because the software has done such a bad job.  Result is that the
> >client pays double.

>Lee Bumgarner
>"Views are mine and not those of my employer."

** Tomohiro Hori **
thori001 -at- acs -dot- bu -dot- edu