Re: Need to translate Oracle desktop instruction manuals into Spa nish , French, and Italian

[Bill Burns <BillDB -at- ILE -dot- COM>]

Diane writes:

> one of the international fellows asked me how i'd go about geting these
> manuals translated into spanish, french, and italian.  it seems logical
> that
> boilerplate or standard Oracle documentation cannot be adapted to this
> task,
> although a terminology dictionary might help.
>
> he also asked me to investigate translation software.  i'm pretty sure
> we're
> not alloting a large amount of money for this task.
>
I agree with what Betsy said concerning human translation, but I wanted to
clarify something about machine translation. What you see on the web at
AltaVista is not a complete machine-translation environment, and all it can
do is give you the gist of what's on a page (also referred to as
"gisting"--yecch). Many of the software packages you looked at are probably
more along these lines--$50-100.00 shrink-wrapped packages that "instantly
translate your documents into [insert language preference of your choice
here]."

Industrial-strength machine translation is not cheap, and it must be used
with a tightly controlled source development process to be of any use. These
systems use well-defined glossaries and post-translation editing. In some
industries, machine translation has been used successfully (at least that's
what I hear), but these industries tend to be more on the low-tech end.
(Again, this is just what I've heard, so I could be off base).

Anyway, if the company isn't allotting much money to the task, my guess is
that machine translation is out. In fact, human translation may be out as
well, unless you're headed for Hugh's House o' Translations (motto--"FIGS is
our fourtay").

Bill  Burns - Eccentric Technology Consultant
ILE Communications Group
billdb -at- ile -dot- com
Call me fishmeal.


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