Translating Documents Into Another Language

[Bankesy]

Hello

 

Does anybody know of a way to translate documents from English into another language?

 

Thankyou in advance

[jinnantonnixx]

Google translate normally gives the best results. Be warned, though, that if you have any legal or contractually important stuff it's best to get it checked by a native speaker.

 

Google Translate

[elsiegee40]

Another vote for Google Translate. We use it regularly

[Michael]

There's Google Translate, but also within Word 2010 itself - Review (tab) > Translate.

 

Neither are perfect, but at least you can get an idea. Sometimes the context is totally wrong also, so bear this in mind!

[Ketlane]

With Google Translate and others you will not get a perfect result. But it does remove a good deal of the drudgery of translation: my approach for English > German, English > French is to run the translator and then do some very careful proofreading and editing, with a bilingual dictionary handy. Certainly I'd never use the raw translation for any work purpose without careful review.

[unixman_again]

Do what I do and pay a visit to one of the MFL teachers. You'll get a much better translation.

[synaesthesia]

I never knew about that (Word 2010 translation). I think a few people may be interested in that at our place!

[Elison]

Personally I wouldnt recommend using Google translator. I'll give an example. I used it to translate some documents from russian to english and vice versa, and it translated ok, but only to understand the main meanning. It has no idea about grammar, at all.

Last week I had to translate some documents from Finnish to russian. Apperantly, google has big troubles with Finnish, coz it translated only 30-40% of all words and again, no sense in sentences, coz it doesnt pay attention to grammar. The same situation with French.

Its ok to use Google translator if you just want to understand the meaning of what it written in the document. But if you need the professional translation, or you r going to present the translated documents to someone else, its better to use another tool. Honestly, I donno what is used in english speaking countries, but here ABBY Lingvo is more frequently used. It translates from english as well to differant languages.

[elsiegee40]

The same applies to any auto translator. You cannot guarantee that any of them will translate to the true meaning of the document. In fact, even a fluent human is likely to get it wrong.

 

This is in part because nobody ever writes to a standard English grammar 100% of the time. Every translator works to a set of rules that may or may not have been applied by the writer.

 

Translating the document to another language and then translating it back simply compounds the 'errors' made first time round.

 

The best you can hope for is the general gist. If 100% accuracy is needed, for legal reasons for example, you need to pay out for a human translator certified in such things. They are not cheap.

[pete]

Bribe an MFL teacher with biscuits.