Re: translation

["Simon North" <sintac -at- home -dot- nl>]

Hi Paul, 

Four weeks sounds optimistic. It is quite normal to send out translations in 
parts. 
 
Any half-decent translation bureau or freelancer, should be using a 
translation package that includes a translation memory (Trados, SDLX, 
STAR Transit, just to name the ones I use).  Using one of these packages, 
a translation can be made once and the results kept. The second time the 
document comes by, assuming it has been changed, it can be automatically 
pre-translated to filter out the parts that have not changed. The remaining 
are categorised as fuzzy matches or new text and treated accordingly (and 
charged at a lower rate accordingly). 

As for Peter's idea of Systran ... no offense meant, but ha ha ha. I 
occasionally use Prompt, especially for a language I am not too familiar 
with such as Russian, but these packages have very limited language 
support and still suck big time. Machine translation has not come very far in 
more than 20 years. A pre-scan will pick out the obvious phrases and save 
some time in trivial sentences, but anything above elementary school level 
requires either a disproportionate amount of preparation or a massive 
amount of post-scan clean up that it simply isn't worth the effort on anything 
but really large, standard projects (defense documentation, where it's pretty 
constant and BIG ... the Leopard main battle tank maintenance docs were 
more than 500,000 words). 

Hope this helps. 

Simon.   


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