xanad wrote:Hi Don,
is an interesting way, above all for long files, but we must
remember to check the translation because google sometimes translates in
his own way, not the right one.
Hello, xanad.
I'll second you, with this correction
:
google ALWAYS translates in its own way !
For French<>English translation at least -- and perhaps from
all latin
languages to English and vice versa, I find that
reverso offers more
accurate translations than Google.
A general resource,
lexicool provides a list of online translation sites for
perhaps all the languages in the world.
This is important:
If you use automatic translation sites and you need to validate the
translation of a particular word or expression, the multilingual site
wordreference is accessible to anyone and easy to use. Most of all,
it's reliable, since it's based on input from
professional translators
and from people who speak the target language.
You should never try to translate a text into a language that you're not
fluent in -- unless you want your reader to perceive you as a clown.
If you want to become a translator and you need to practice your skills,
that's fine, but always have your translations, especially automatic
translations, checked by a professional translator or at the very least by a
native speaker.
I hear you asking: "Why?"
Well, the perennial problem with automatic translations, even simple ones,
is -- has always been and always will be -- that no computer-language
algorithm will ever be able to innately understand the context and situation
in which a word or expression is used. Only we humans are able to perceive
those differences and decode their true meaning for our situation.
It's like intonation, but amplified a hundred times. Depending on the
intonation, the simple sentence: "There will be snow tomorrow." can be:
* a joke to your friends, if you're in the middle of summer on a frying-hot
day, with a cold beer in your hand;
* a tease, if the person you're talking to didn't believe there would be snow
tomorrow, and the weatherman on TV just said a polar vortex is coming
down from Hudson's Bay.
* a mild warning, from a mother who wants her child to keep warm on her
school outing.
* a severe warning to his sailors from the the captain of a Coast Guard
vessel, with an order to be on high alert, because a serious winter storm
is heading towards the Bay at 60 knots per hour, and not all fishermen are
at port yet.
* etc., etc.
One simple sentence, and we have how many meanings? Indeed, correctly
translating a text is like decoding the tone of voice, but a hundred times
more difficult and with a hundred times more possibilities of expression.
Finally, if I ever meet don570 in the streets of Ottawa (Ottawa is across
the river from my city), I'll have a very serious chat with him about why
he wishes to put professional translators out of a job and generally
promote mediocre translations. Heck, I have thirty years of experience
in translation and I still call a colleague for revisions regularly.
Don, what have we translators ever done to you to deserve this? Viewing
the issue from the receiving end: our Puppyists and our applications
deserve better than automatic translations, don't you think?
Sorry for having taken so much of your time, but I felt some t's needed to
be barred concerning accuracy in human communication. BFN.
musher0
Solution: adds the dots before the extensions
Of course musher0, also for us.