Saturday, July 11, 2009

Testing a translation tool

GTImage by Fantake via Flickr
You might have noticed that I'm testing Google Translate as a gadget on this weblog (see the left-top corner). Looks cool in Hebrew doesn't it? But I wonder whether the translation makes sense. I could check translations into Dutch and German, but was not impressed. Party, it is the language I use. When you add sayings, metaphors and other language tricks, the system gets lots.

But do you want to help me? Test it for your languages and tell me if the translation makes sense to you.

(You can click on the picture to get a better view)



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2 comments:

Mike Unwalla said...

Quote: When you add sayings, metaphors and other language tricks, the system gets lots.

For the best results with machine translation, use simple text. Do not use idioms, metaphors, sayings, jokes, or complex sentences. The best guidelines about how to write for machine translation are in 'The Global English style guide: writing clear, translatable documentation for a global market' by John R Kohl, 2008 (ISBN 978-1-59994-657-3). For a review of the book, see http://www.techscribe.co.uk/ta/global-english-style-guide.htm. (Although the book's title contains the word 'documentation', the guidelines apply to most business texts.)

For business communication, simple text is good. Usually, if text is simple, machine translation gives satisfactory translations (http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation.html).

4:30 PM
China Herald said...

Thanks Mike,
I'm afraid you are right. Problem: I do not want to change my way of writing just to accommodate Google Translate, although it would be useful to enlarge my potential audience. And then, I have entries from 2004, no way it would be possible to change them.

7:38 PM

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