“Be sure not to turn on the power supply” can easily turn into “Be sure to turn on the power supply”. It’s easy to reverse or otherwise obscure the meaning of a sentence because of a simple human error. So unless you employ these people full-time, it may be difficult to translate small edits.Īnother problem with humans is that significant errors in the meaning of the text might occur. An automatic reverse translation will miss some poor translations (in particular poor translations of technical terms) and at the same time make false alarms.īut the worst problem with human translation is that every future change in text requires contacting the people who made the translation, and ask them to make the adjustments. It’s extremely difficult to verify that the work was done well, in particular when the document is technical, as it’s not possible to give it to just someone and ask if it’s well written. However but both options have their disadvantages: Working with a human necessarily requires trusting that a specific person will perform the job thoroughly, and well, that’s anything but taken for granted. But the results are far from satisfactory. Some tools allow choosing a specific dictionary, and there are ways to shape the behavior of the translator. All translation tools just pick one meaning. For example, the word “driver” could be a car driver or a term related to a computer. It’s mainly because there is no way to give the translating tool hints about the context. The short answer: Yes, as of 2023, human translation is much better. This post was written in the summer of 2022, and odds are that things will change dramatically over the course of time. For example, the translation of this post to Chinese, Japanese and Korean. I also did something similar with translating web pages. But that alone was a long way from the finish line, as elaborated in this unexpectedly long post.Ī different post discusses the technical aspects of talking with Google Cloud’s API as well as creating documents in these languages with LaTeX. One of the advantages of having the document written in LaTeX to begin with, is that the LaTeX text formatting commands effectively flag the parts that aren’t just plain language in the text, so it’s relatively easy to spot them and protect them. Even worse, there are code examples with explanation in the text, file names, references to variable names and other elements that become meaningless if translated.
The immediate approach was to feed Google Translate with the pdf documents, but not only are the results ugly, but then there are a lot of technical terms in the documents which are better not translated.
This post summarizes my insights as I worked my way through translating some technical documents, written in LaTeX, into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Posted Under: Internet, Software Introduction This post was written by eli on August 15, 2022
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