language translator (chinese - english) needed

[zora65]

I am currently in need of a PC based language translator. I have a large number of Word documents that are in Chinese that need to be translated to English. The free web based translators (like Google translate) are not an option due to the large volume of documents, pain with the cut and paste approach and security concerns.

I have found one program from Babylon Translation Software that will translate a Word document via drag and drop or from within Word. Hoping someone here on Eng-Tips has some real world experience they can share.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[MintJulep]

Any machine translation will result in unintelligible gibberish.

Pay a competent human translator.

 

[zora65]

MintJulep - agree completely. I even have people in house that can do this for me but they are either busy, translation duties are not in their job description and it would take too much time. A quick turn around is important and the machine translation usually gives us enough information to understand the basics.

 

[PSE]

I second MintJulep's post. Translation software can only get you so far and can have tremendous difficulties with both technical wording (since it tends not to be part of regular or common language use) and the context of the information being conveyed. You can find professional translators or if you are perhaps fortunate enough and your company supports internships, find an intern with those skills.

Bruce Youngman

http://www.dynamicsolutions-mi.com

 

[IRstuff]

Chinese is particularly difficult to translate; in addition having a relatively small set of words to map into a larger set in English, idioms tend to be VERY context specific, i.e., words used in the context of automotive might have radically different connotations than those used in conversational contexts, and this is all coupled with Chinese words doing phonetics only, e.g., see-ben-sah, for "Spencer," this from a rather light Cantonese movie we watched last night.

I would guess that any intern will do only marginally better than machine translation; anyone sufficiently conversant in both Chinese and English is not necessarily competent at translation, and anyone who is not steeped in the idiom will have the same difficulty that a machine translator will have.

Oh, did I mention Cantonese? The official language is Mandarin, and there are also idiomatic differences between those two and any other major dialect, like Shanghainese.

TTFN
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[DRWeig]

There are translation services that you can find online, not too expensive.

Best to use a pro. I learned enough Mandarin to get by, but I haven't practiced in five years. It's a tough language to learn.

Best to you,

Goober Dave

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