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Re: Spanish translator

Title: Re: [GWL] Spanish translator
on 11/7/04 10:04 AM, KTCopsey@aol.com at KTCopsey@aol.com wrote:
online translators are fun and easy to use (according to my college kids, who use them all the time).  They give you at least the gist of what is written.

My company has tried to use online translation software to translate plant descriptions from American English to North American Spanish. Most of the software packages we looked at use either generic or Castilian Spanish, which is not the same as what most Hispanics speak in the US, who come from Mexico, Central and South American, Cuba, the Caribbean countries and elsewhere.

Often the software does not even give you the gist of the message. A gist may be fine for your own casual reading, but is useless for publication. In the translation of Barry Glick’s story, what the heck does “for the winter beautifulnesses under the people” mean? Sometimes the software produces entire paragraphs of gibberish like that – totally meaningless, sometimes insulting and occasionally very wrong. If the software has no Spanish word for your English word, it puts your English word in the Spanish sentence. You would be surprised how much jargon we use in horticulture. We all know what a ‘staked perennial’ is or what it means to ‘deadhead an annual’ or ‘mulch a bed’. There are countless words and phrases like that that are confusing to a translator, not to mention the general public.

The software programs rely on a custom dictionary for reference. If you buy the software, you can build your own reference dictionary but that is laborious; but one translation service quoted us $5000 just to build a horticultural dictionary! We tried using the online translation programs then having a Hispanic person “clean-up the text” but that was a waste of time; often they said they needed to rewrite the whole thing. We now use computer savvy bilingual individuals who understand gardening. In the long run, there is no substitution for quality.
--
Best regards,
Larry Maupin
Maupin Photography
 
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