Re: [tlug] Free program translates Euro languages to/from English

[Drew Poulin <poulin@example.com>]

Micheal E Cooper wrote:
> I second that. Considering that people's lives are on the line with
> factory manuals, it amazes me that they can be so vague. 

I'm a medical translator, and a good deal of what I translate is 
submitted to the regulatory authorities in the U.S.  So lives really are 
on the line.  Even then, there's a lot of ambiguity in the Japanese.

> Again true, but to be fair, my first bachelors was in English, and I can
> tell you that literary theory, criticism, and scholarly work on the whole
> is thick with needlessly long, complex sentences the purpose of which is
> 10% to convey meaning and 90% to raise the author in the intellectual
> pecking order.

I'm sure you're right.  It seems a bit ironic that trained communicators 
would do such a poor job of conveying meaning, but I suppose, as you 
say, they're really trying to convey something else.


> That having been said, it seems to me that, rather than trying to make a
> system that will translate for you (so that you can fire the translator)
> or an online educ package that will teach for you (so that you can fire
> some teachers), it seems more sensible to focus on creating tools that
> will allow translators and teachers to do what they do better and more
> efficiently.

At least as far as translation is concerned, there does seem to be a 
fair amount of effort being devoted to that.  Trados and Wordfast are 
two translation-memory apps that come to mind.  And Wordfast even works 
on Linux -- as long as you're running MS Word on Linux via Crossover.


Drew