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Tag Archives: use of translation softwares

The extent translation is ‘correct’

14 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in translation

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grammar-translation method, Translation, use of translation softwares

I’m going to write again about the special field of translation, and only about a small section thereof, so my topic should actually be read as “What does the percentage score of agreement mean when using machine translation as basis?” I would like to invite fellow translators to comment on the issue. However, I also hope to provide further proof against the validity of using the ‘grammar-translation method’ in language teaching. Or at least further warning about it.

The main reason for me to write today, plainly put, is that I’m not very experienced in translating based on CAT tools and machine supported translation tools. I’ve received one agreement so far that included percentages of my full price if there was a partial agreement between the pre-translated (by Google, for example) version and my corrected version. I haven’t actually received any jobs yet from this client, but I keep wondering about what it means in practice. I can imagine % of agreement between Dutch and German, or English, or Swedish, but my feeling is that there may be very rough estimations and even wrong ones between languages of very different nature. To be explained later below.

Another reason is that I must prepare a long list of my own so that I can convert the whole thing into an auto-suggest dictionary or term base. I use a translation tool for it, and a global service helps me, but one feature of the software helps me identify and apply translations that I’ve already done through the translation memory I’m creating along the way. There’s the rub. After I translated “take note”, I wasn’t offered automatic similar answer when the next phrase to be translated was “take note of”. However, when the following item was “taken notes of” (I’d originally made a typo using the -n), I was given a 71% score relative to the previous one, and a possible translation based on mine with that one. On the other hand, after I did “throw (threw, thrown), hurl, fling”, I was given 85% when I tried to translate “throw (threw, thrown), yield”. I wonder how – ‘yield’ has nothing to do with hurling or flinging, yet, the similarity was found higher here than when I accidentally added the third form of ‘take’ with the plural of ‘note’.

On the text level, I don’t think anyone could come up with anything better than the famous Karinthy story with the cross-translations between Hungarian and German. On a lower level, I have an idea to show what I mean by asking about this problem. Here is goes.

Let’s suppose there is a situation when someone was murdered, there was a knife found next to a pool, the identity of the victim not yet revealed at the beginning of the news. In Hungarian, the text could go like this,

“Az áldozatot valószínűleg késsel ölték meg. A dikicset közvetlenül a medence mellett találta meg a rendőrség. Az elkövetés időpontja még bizonytalan, de a száraz vér okán a dikics már napok óta ott fekhetett.”

Well, because the target language is English, the native English translator may not directly remember what a ‘dikics’ is, he may be a tennis fan and may fail to look up the Hungarian word because he remembers Ms Dokic, former tennis player’s name. There is really not a lot of difference, so he may easily come up with the following translation of the second sentence,

“Dokic was found dead right next to the pool by police.” Deepest apologies to the living person, but the translation tool could well find a 90% or 95% similarity between this and my correction, based on which I would have to give up quite a lot of my earnings on this sentence. However, the meanings of the two sentences couldn’t be greater. The corrector would have to recreate the sentence and give it a completely different meaning, revealing that it was not a person and not dead that was found next to the pool. Not to mention the problem of defamation to the person very much alive. And not to mention that if it were really Ms Dokic, the Hungarian text would read ‘Dokic-ot’, not ‘A dikicset’. Very different, but no MT would understand the difference. I would venture to add that anyone checking my translation with a CAT-tool would also overlook the difference. I would deem the original translation almost worthless, but for the correction, the corrector would receive perhaps only 10% or 20% of his full fee.

Working on my own word list, I am also continually perturbed by the fact that verb forms of English words are identified as nouns, like “bark” as a verb comes in invariably as “kéreg”, and, what’s more, mostly suffixed, like “snore” becomes “horkolással”, while “blare” becomes “Katonazenét hallottunk”. Boggles the mind.

It is also nice when a simple list of verbs is turned into a completely wrong sentence, like from “spot, catch sight of, descry”, I get the result as “Helyszíni, mikor a pusztaságot,” In this way, with a comma at the end. Similarly, when I use the tool for texts, it regularly up-end the translation by adding a negative in Hungarian to the originally positive sentence. Why, one wonders incessantly.

For more fun for Hungarian speakers, let me quote here two machine-translated Hungarian terms from TermWiki, the aspiring definition-provider,

“szerecsendió
fűszer (egészben vagy őrölve) leírás: a szerecsendió fa szürkésbarna, ovális magot. Buzogány a spice, nyert a magokat a membrán. Diós, meleg, fűszeres, édes. Felhasználás: Italok (esp. tojás nog), sütemények, cookie-kat, szószok, édes burgonya, tejsodó és kenyerek”
and
“Folyó Georgina

Georgina folyó ez Észak-három fő folyók, a csatorna ország nyugati Queensland áramlását rendkívül nedves években, hogy a Eyre-tó.”

No comment. But if someone got such texts to be corrected, based on the similarity of many of the original words to the correction, I am afraid that the fee would not reflect the fact that the whole text would have to be re-done.

Aspiring translators of unrelated languages: beware! Students swotting words of a foreign language: beware!

On the other hand, I would gladly receive any kind of feed-back from En-Hun or Hun-En translators, or any other, even if there’s a great disagreement with the above.

by P. S.

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Translating using translation software

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in translation

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

basic services of translation software, kinds of translation software, Translation, use of translation softwares

Perhaps a few of my readers are thinking sometimes of trying to do translation, perhaps seriously despite the difficulties. As I read more and more opinions and information about this profession on the various sites, I can see that some people have achieved very high fee levels compared to others. Of course, we have to develop a lot professionally before we can also achieve something comparable, and, in spite of what I wrote in my previous post, translation software does play a role in this nowadays.

As my former Chinese students used always to say, “With the development of modern technology …”, and I can add that we can’t avoid software for long. But we have to be careful which software to buy first. If we get more income, we will surely expand our business towards various other kinds, but the first one is the big risk as far as I can see. So here are my discoveries and ideas about the choice, without mentioning names, which you will have to find out for yourself.

First of all, almost all software ads will state in one form or another that theirs is a market leader, or the best, or most widely used, or most complete or most useful one. Sometimes there is some partial truth in these statements, sometimes a bit less is true.

Most software, as you probably know, is expensive. No wonder, as there’s been a lot of work and know-how invested in creating them. Although sometimes a software can be cracket, this road is not only against the law and thus may prove dangerous, but also of partial use, simply because most software uses internet sources, and if we somehow enter those common sites and resources, we will probably be discovered as hackers. If we don’t use them, the software is of very limited use.

Most software has been made for Windows systems. There is only one for Mac systems, though some people claim to have found some others, but later these have proved otherwise. Mac users have to install some software that allows them to also run Windows, and then they can install anything they want.

And here comes the snag: which are good ones that we can afford? As I haven’t got much capital, I’ve only invested in one. Fortunately, some other programs run in limited  mode as well, with limited TM (translation memory) allowed. Translation memory is one thing that we use while translating, so it is important, but if 500 items are allowed, it will be enough first, to find out how well the program works. Every software saves our solutions as TM while working. If we run out of further possibility to build our TM, we can still use the advantages of accessing internet sources for our translation work. Be aware, however, that most such sources come with paid membership. Even use of GoogleTranslate costs in such cases, which suggests to me that the service I’d get if I paid would be far better than the public source as we know it.

Some software allow us to use various global servers and services, only that most of them cost an additional amount of investment. Sometimes we are offered a free server, but then suddenly we have to discover not only that our program has a few bugs, but also that this free server suddenly disappears, ‘the link is down’, ‘the address cannot be resolved’, and the like. The original provider usually may be willing to help if you have also paid for their support services, apart from the price of the product, of course. If we are fortunate, we may be a member of a translator community where somebody could have an explanation or a solution. Or not.

Another source we can use is our term base that we are supposed to build up using our work. However, that’s something we have to build up, and with a limited edition, that is also limited. With a fully registered software, we may be allowed to pay for use of an on-line term-base. But a bigger surprise is when we realize that an apparently market leader software does not in itself make it possible for us to build our term base. They graciously forget to mention that we would have to buy another – not very cheap – software that does it for us if, also only if, we buy yet another kind which first converts our own file built up for this purpose (for example, as an Excel file) to enable the second software to transfer it to the main translation program. Brilliant. I would already be at twice the original – and quite hefty – investment. Other software may call this term-base a glossary, but not all software allows you to create this either.

Then there is the promise of an auto-suggest dictionary. Only that you need to have a ridiculously large TM that you can convert into such a base, or you need paid membership of an internet source. Costs may keep rising towards the sky. Let’s not forget that some clients would demand a translator to work for $1 per 300 or 500 words. Add to it that we would have to pay tax after that. But the software has already cost us perhaps $800, or more. How many hundreds of pages of documents do you have to translate and how many hours only for this to return? So you’ll have to be careful about what kind of work and terms you accept if you are intent on becoming a good, professional translator.

When you work with software, the problems mentioned in my earlier posts will still come up, but probably less and less frequently if you manage to build up your own resources. Then the only problem that may remain for you is the quality of the source. While most is probably of good quality, sometimes you have to face texts (for examples notes, or minutes of meetings, or translated material from a relatively exotic language) which are hard to understand than normal. You have to be prepared to face the situation and use your most intelligent guess.

At the moment I’m not absolutely sure if complaining is against any ethical rules, or not. But because I enjoy exposing problems, let me quote a few things I’ve encountered. First this one:

“Getting to understand the supplier needs to make profit to run the business.”

This is often a typical ambiguous sentence, and only context can help to understand. If my software gives me this, for example, in Hungarian, “Már ha érted a nyertes ajánlattevőnek kell azért, hogy hasznot futni az üzleti,” well, I’m in dire straights.

Just to pay tribute to software makers, let me quote another glitch here. The original was also not unambiguous, “It’s all about a change of mind-set,” but after reading through a large part of the text, I definitely understood it better than the software, which came up with “Ez az egész a szem előtt tartva.” A nice one. But if I want to add more humour, very few examples beat the translation of this famous fable character, “Little Red Riding Hood”, which happens to become “Kis piros motoros ernyő” in Hungarian. No chance of recognizing the whole for the parts.

Two more examples of sheer bad English:

“600K will we pay longer charge more?” and “They are the people spend the money and sign the invoices.” No comment. However, for the end, I have a more complex example, full with machine translation for fun. The set of text:

“Eight stories have been created with 6 story owners. Depending on which BU identified the story owners were used as a vehicle to communicate. It scrolls down and if the visitor scrolls up the story starts to unfold.”

To my unhampered amusement, this was translated by my software as follows:

“Nyolc történet tulajdonosok hozták létre a 6. Attól függően, hogy melyik BU a történet tulajdonosok használták a járművet. Az Szkrollozzon lefelé görgeti fel és ha a látogató a történet kezd kibontakozni.”

Horror. So be careful with GoogleTranslate – that’s even worse than this!

Good luck to your translations!

by P. S.

Translation problems with machine translation

13 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in translation

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Tags

Translation, use of translation softwares

In my previous post I included an example to what kinds of mistakes may come up when we use translation software, or machine translation. A problem for the translator is that without using a software, translation is more difficult and time-consuming, whereas some clients expressly warn the potential translators of their originals against using machine translation. Of course, they have a reason: a lot of self-proclaimed ‘translators’ possibly use GoogleTranslate and submit their cheap work as a copy of the result there.

By showing the results provided by a professional translation software, I would like to warn anyone and everyone who uses this or other software means to carefully go through their result received from the software and weed out silly mistakes before they submit anything to a client.

First, let us see the original sentence again:

“On behalf of the EWC Mr. Born requested XXX management to provide full openness, to correct the current situation urgently and to keep the EWC informed.”

Let me show you first again what kind of a Hungarian answer the program provided me with. I believe you will agree (if you understand some Hungarian) that this is a hilarious solution for my investment in buying the software:

“Az Úr nevében született EWC kért az XXX a teljes körű nyilvánosság, az aktuális helyzet és sürgősen tájékoztatni az EWC.”

Let us see now some other languages for the sake of people from all over the world. I’d like to start with the German version because it may serve as a counter-example to the Hungarian one: because German is similar to English, the translation of the same sentence may provide a much better result. Here it is:

“Im Namen des Betriebsrats Herr geboren hat XXX-Management um eine vollständige Offenheit, Korrekturen an der aktuellen Situation dringend geboten und die EAK informiert.”

Once again, it is obvious that the software is at least guilty of not being able to differentiate between names and ordinary words despite the fact that they have Mr (or Ms, of Mrs) before them and are spelt with a capital. Too bad.

Here comes the Spanish (international) version (the program could differentiate among Latin-American, Argentine, Salvadoran, or many other versions of Spanish), for the sake of people from Latin-America or the Philippines:

“En nombre del Comité el Sr. Nacido pidió XXX management para proporcionar una completa transparencia, para corregir la situación actual con urgencia y para mantener el CER.”

As I speak Dutch and sometimes also translate from it, I’m interested how the program handles this language (not the Belgian version):

“Namens de EAC Mr. Geboren gevraagd XXX management om volledige openheid, om de huidige situatie dringend en houd de EAC geïnformeerd.”

It is clear that the name is considered to be a name, but is still translated (in the Hungarian version, sometimes this also led to exceptionally hillarious distortions of other names, sometimes in several words), however, here the infinitives of purpose are neglected save for the insertion of ‘om’, but without following verbs, just like in the Hungarian version. Nice.

Now let’s see the French version (France):

“Au nom de l’EWC M. né prié XXX gestion de lui fournir une totale transparence, de corriger la situation actuelle d’urgence et de garder le CED a informé.”

Looks a lot better with the verbs and all. Perhaps it may be similar with Italian, so I don’t look into that. Let us see the Russian solution instead:

“От имени EWC г-н родился просил управления XXX для обеспечения полной открытости, для текущей ситуации и в срочном порядке информировать EWC.”

And for the sake of one sixth of the world, let’s look into Chinese (simplified, PRC):

“代表先生的出生的EWC要求XXX管理层提供全面公开,以纠正当前紧急情况并随时向EWC通报情况。”

Actually, EWC and the very well-known company name in Latin letters doesn’t look very Chinese, I don’t believe there isn’t a proper set of characters for those – they have characters for everything, even for ‘Karakószörcsög’, if I search carefully enough. But for fun, I’ve put this sentence into GoogleTranslate to see what I get back for English:

“On behalf of Mr. XXX born EWC requires management to provide full disclosure to rectify the current emergency situation and to keep informed EWC.”

Only the urgency is forgotten, and the names are jumbled a bit. Other than that, English seems to be a lot closer to Chinese than Hungarian. But from all the above, my warning that use of softwares depend heavily on the pairs of languages required seems to be relevant.

Well, this is it about translation softwares now. I’m really looking forward to your opinion, people.

by P. S.

 

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