Effectively translating sites

[Pauly]

Here's a question for you all; How would one go about effectively translating content from English, to say Spanish without typing the Spanish up?

See, what I want to do is, type the content in English than have the backend convert it into several foreign languages. But what I'm afraid of, is that the translation will be to strict or not strict enough. I want it to be done correctly and make sense.

So, I'm interested in your theories on how such a system would work, and how extensive thew code would be to achieve the desired goal.

[ethicaldesign]

Bearing in mind the amount of time, expertise and money that google have likely thrown at their language convertors, and the way they lack compared to a real translation by a human translator, I would say writing something like this for yourself isn't going to be feasible.

At the simplest level a simple language dictionary could be used to translate one word to another, but that isn't going to produce very good results as it doesn't take into consideration sentence construction or context. I imagine you'd need a fair amount of AI to get it working even reasonably well and even then I doubt it would surpass the google type systems unless you've got some novel technique in mind that those engineers haven't stumbled across yet.

Beyond the technical challenges, you're also going to have to have someone who's proficient in each of the languages that you build the system for. By proficient I don't just mean speak it, but understand the rules of each language in lots of detail. This isn't quite as straightforward as you might think. I had a friend at university who spent a year out in russia teaching english, and I remember him telling me that it really made him realise how little he really understood the english language when he was faced with explaining it to people properly. Explaining it to a computer program is going to be so much harder ofcourse.

I could be wrong, but my guess is that you'd find it much easier to provide a link that uses an existing online translation service. You can do this with google. If you click the link:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ethicaldesign.co.uk&l angpair=en%7Cde&hl=en&c2coff=1&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

It should display my site in german. This means that you've got branding on there though there are probably paid for services that will remove that.

If this is for a site that's selling anything, or you are very serious about reaching those markets in other languages, then I think you'd be better to actually approach people who speak the languages you're interested in converting to and have human translations done. This is the way that professional international companies approach this, so that seems to indicate that that's the best way at the moment.

If you do decide to go ahead and give it a try yourself, I'm sure you'd find it challenging and interesting to do and would learn a lot from the process, so I don't want to put you off. If you're counting on the outcome being able to convert language perfectly then you might be disapointed at the end though.

If you check out some foreign language sites and convert them to english using the google translator you'll see what I mean.

[ethicaldesign]

For a quick example of how hard this is to do effectively, here's a translation from english to german and back again (a conversion one way won't be quite as bad in most cases but will still be far from perfect):

Original text:

"The Ethical Design Collective provides a range of professional, creative and technical services to business, creative, non-profit and charity organisations."

Converted to german and back again:

"The ethical collective Design puts a distance the specialist -, more creatively and to technical services to more creatively, non-profit and the next love the organizations of the business, at the disposal."

[vigo]

The code would be huge - too huge - and also impossible to write. Solving this type of problem is effectively impossible (unless someone's got a gizmo up their sleave that can pass the Turing test in two languages? :)) The trouble is there are no fixed rules of languages (dispite what languages students say about semantics and structure no human language approches the logic of, say, C).

As ethicaldesign said above, either use babelfish and live with the pigeon nature of the the translation (certainly not "effective" - especailly for sales letters!) or hire a pro., they don't cost as much as you might think (especially if you go for someone with official acceediation, in the UK this means their rates are set centrally w.r.t. experiance).

v.

[Tjobbe]

i can translate to dutch if that helps! :lol:

[ethicaldesign]

People like Tjobbe might be your best bet, particularly if you don't have a budget to pay for professional translation services (no offence meant to tjobbe's language skills by that btw! - just that not operating as a professional translation service you might be able to do a better deal).

I've come across a lot of people on boards, (wht immediately springs to mind), who mightn't be working as translators but who have very good English skills, but who also speak a foreign language (sometimes as their first language). There are some cases in particular where such people appear to have better language skills than native English speakers.

I'm not sure if you'd really need the services of professional translators if you can find a few people in each target language that you're aiming for. Anyone who is good at English as a second language, is probably a good indicator that they're going to be just as good or better in their native tongue and could handle the translation for you. If this is a technology oriented website they might even do a better job than a regular translator because they'll have knowledge of the subject area aswell.

[Tjobbe]

No offence caused at all,

but heres something, English is my second language :D :D I'm half dutch :wink:

[ethicaldesign]

After re-reading what I just posted above, you're probably better at it than I am :D (was in a bit of a hurry!).

[Pauly]

Thanks for your replies all :)

[Christina]

Automated translation is definitely not the way to go....I've seen some simple stuff in english to be translated into spanish just completely get butchered! :lol:

[Tjobbe]

I think this is what a lot of the spam email companies must use, some of the english on the emails I receive is appalling.