[ale] [Waaaay OT] Low volume website translation?

[John Wells]

This thread brings to mind this week's episode of Frasier.  Anyone catch it?

Frasier had a need to deliver a speech at his son's bar mitzvah and wanted
to do it in Hebrew.  He enlisted Noel (the local geek) to help translate.

Short story is that Frasier pissed Noel off, leading Noel to provide the
entire speech in Klingon.  Watching Frasier deliver this to a roomful had
me rolling.

You had to be there, but it was pretty funny ;-).  Be careful who you
enlist to do your translations.

John

Geoffrey said:
> The problem with translating English to any other language is the lack
> of consistency in rules and particularily words that have the same
> spelling but mean entirely different things, such as the following
> sentence:
>
> I LEAD a team of experts in the research on LEAD poisoning
>
> Unless the translation engine is very good at recognizing the context in
>  which the word is used, it fails, and most of them do (how well does M$
>  word do grammar checking???  terrible).  The best way to see if you're
> getting a reasonable translation is to reverse your translation and see
> what you get (English->Spanish->English).
>
> If you're putting up a real commerce site, I'd recommend you get
> professional translation.  I was going to put up a Spanish version of my
>  wife's classroom website, but every translation engine I used provided
> inconsistent results, and none were close enough for me to publish it.
>
> cforsell wrote:
>> I have used http://freetranslation.com/ .  Cut and paste your text to
>> their site and within a few seconds you get the translation (French,
>> Spanish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese).
>>
>> I had a few paragraphs translated and had them checked for accuracy.
>> The translations were not perfect, but were close enough that the
>> translator knew what I was saying... and it is free.
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Christopher Bergeron" <christopher at bergeron.com>
>> To: <ale at ale.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 6:47 PM
>> Subject: [ale] [Waaaay OT] Low volume website translation?
>>
>>
>>
>>>Guys I apologize that this is sooo way OT, but I can't think of who
>>> else I could ask.  I'm looking for a low volume (about a page per
>>> month) website translation.  I want my new eCommerce venture to be in
>>> German and Spanish.  I'm not sure who can offer this kind of service.
>>> Would I look online for this or should I try to find a translator in
>>> the local phonebook?  I know about babelfish; but I'd like a
>>> professional
>>
>> translation.
>>
>>>Does anyone know of such a beast/company/organization?
>>>
>>>thanks,
>>>CB
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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>
> --
> Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at 3times25.net
>
> I didn't have to buy my radio from a specific company to listen
> to FM, why doesn't that apply to the Internet (anymore...)?
>
>
> ---
> This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list. See
> http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be
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sent to listmaster at ale dot org.