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>This reminds me of a very happy year I spent post-translating Japanese
>database manuals. The client, a large Japanese vendor of very-high-end
>database software had taken their huge, originally-in-Japanese manuals and
>-- apparently -- run them through -- well it was so long ago that it
>certainly wasn't Babelfish -- something or someone who generated something
>that looked like English but it was not English. The results of that
>process were enough to provide me with ample, well-paid work for three days
>a week for almost a year.
If you'd been translating from scratch - starting with the original Japanese
- would you have done it faster?
That was the point I was trying to make: that the sensible use of automatic
translation should assist a professional translator in converting a large
text from one language to another. Obviously, computer translation can never
replace a human translator: but I would have thought that for anything
written in formal non-colloquial language, automatic translation would help,
rather than hinder, the human translator. Would thr professional translators
on the list care to comment on this perhaps overly optimistic assumption?
I use Babel Fish for getting the gist of e-mails sent by my French
colleagues - if in French, they're always informal and casual (officially we
all use American English) but the Fish usually manages to get the meaning
across, if slightly incoherently. (I also, as you may have noticed, run
Jabberwocky through it... keeps it alert and bubbly.)
Jane Carnall
Technical Writer, Compaq, UK
Unless stated otherwise, these opinions are mine, and mine alone.
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