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RE: Spanish translator

Title: Message
Dear Larry,
 
Thank you for your great description of computer-generated translations.
 
The people who are interested in hiring this person never considered a software program for a minute. For one thing, the book in question is arcane by any western standard, so you know that a program couldn't handle it. As well, the translator must be able to WRITE well enough to keep some of the grace of the original translation--an American-English version of a Mandarin Chinese book about four pillars analysis. Right! Not a chance that a software program could handle that.
 
But thanks for the suggestion, anyway. For another book, it could be appropriate.
 
Miranda Smith 
 ---------------------------- 
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.


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.

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