Automated Translation – Not Too Bad
March 7, 2008 by Jean Mercedes
Filed under Business
Yesterday my company received a Request for Proposal (RFP) in French.
Now, I am a US citizen living and working in Germany. In our office in Munich, we have folks from a lot of different countries including Spain, Poland, UK and India. But no one from France. (Murphy’s Law)
This time, instead of sending the 40-plus pages out to a translator and paying around 15 Euro cents per word (more if you want it faster than in 4-5 working days), we decided to try out an automated translation program.
We went to a site called Linguatec, paid €240 with a credit card and expected to have a translation in 10 minutes.
Unfortunately, getting our credit card approved by Linguatec took longer than running the translation. We did not get approval to download their software until the next business day!
The software from Linguatec managed to get through the first 7 page Word document pretty well. It didn’t handle the formatting, including numbered lists, so the translated file had to be cleaned up a bit by hand before anybody could read it. But the result was at least comprehensible. Here are a few examples:
Example 1:
Participation at the invitation to tender
The offers have to be written in French language up.
The validity of the offers has to be at least 90 days.
The offers can be addressed by mail, by mail or deposited at the concerned persons ‘ secretariat. No receipt will be signed.
Ok, so the translations aren’t perfect, but I can understand this better than I can understand the original French.
We are planning on writing our proposal in English, using the tool to pre-translate into “French language up” and then getting a native speaker to polish it all up. Although, the formatting alone will be a big job; we might want to rethink that plan…
What do you do when you receive customer information in a language you can’t understand?
Image from origin.cdc.gov.
I’ve had my problems with computer translations. I received a personal E-Mail from a friend in Italy who must have forgotten that I do not speak his language.
I first tried a computer translation which gave me English that no english speaker could understand.
I then sent the E-Mail to Mr South Philadelphia, who was born and raised in Sienna. He returned the same computer translation that I had dismissed. I still don’t know what the message said.
I don’t get anything in foreign language which is commercial secret or privacy matter. Hence I merely use http://world.altavista.com/ a.k.a. Babelfish and do a draft of translation paragraph by paragraph. Granted I have some basic translator/interpreter skills, I can clean down to readable text myself and get the point. So far I did it very few times, but it was free , as free in “free beer” with zero cost of Babelfish and my time spent.
I have tested linguatec for German English now and am very satisfied with the small clipping. It is better than my present programme.
Here is the result. Many thanks for the tip.
In case you missed it, here is another post I wrote on on-line translations. http://www.doingbizabroad.com/online-translations/
Babble Fish is listed in our Blogroll on the right hand side. It is good for translating paragraphs or sentences, as A.T. points out. For longer texts, a software product like Linguatec can be useful, especially if you use it frequently.
@Uta – I am glad the tool is working out for you!
@Jerry – Sometimes you need to use a lot of imagination to understand machine translations.