translation

[obair]

Thanks for the information.

I appreciate the expertise that people here have. I am pretty much in 
the dark here.

best,
Paul

On 31 Bealtaine 2006, at 5:39 pm, Simon North wrote:

> 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.
>
>