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Best chinese - english document translator
- Thread starter sharnyo
- Start date
Used "Transwhiz Translation System" briefly but I must say it was not worth the money or time installing the software. :lol:
The main focus or the most effective part of the translation software seemed to me to be that it was very fast in substituting all the chinese word LITTERALLY for the most common or "equivalent" English words with the "same" meaning. I think this is more of less what you can expect from most pc level machine translation. I am led to believe that translation software that run on servers are much more accurate.
If the difficulty level of the language is much above the difficulty level of spoken dialogue, or very straightforward prose then you should forget using such software. It is just such a waste of time because you need to go over the end result several times "manually" and double check with Chinese dictionaries etc.... The latter is impossible to do if you don't understand or read Chinese at all!! I don't think such PC level translators are meant for people who don't read Chinese at all. I think they are just there to help out professional translators by sorting out the most likely or "equivalent" words to use in target language(English) .
In my opinion I think one is better off hiring a translator, if the documents are important or if one is already somewhat familier with written Chinese, and the written Chinese to be translated is not too difficult or technical, it is probably better or more accurate or overall faster to use a word by word "instant" translation mouse pointer as provided by some PC software dictionaries like ( http://www.Dr eye) and then translating the rest of the document "manually". The end result of such a slower approach will always sound more natural especially if English is one's own or native language. :idea:
The main focus or the most effective part of the translation software seemed to me to be that it was very fast in substituting all the chinese word LITTERALLY for the most common or "equivalent" English words with the "same" meaning. I think this is more of less what you can expect from most pc level machine translation. I am led to believe that translation software that run on servers are much more accurate.
If the difficulty level of the language is much above the difficulty level of spoken dialogue, or very straightforward prose then you should forget using such software. It is just such a waste of time because you need to go over the end result several times "manually" and double check with Chinese dictionaries etc.... The latter is impossible to do if you don't understand or read Chinese at all!! I don't think such PC level translators are meant for people who don't read Chinese at all. I think they are just there to help out professional translators by sorting out the most likely or "equivalent" words to use in target language(English) .
In my opinion I think one is better off hiring a translator, if the documents are important or if one is already somewhat familier with written Chinese, and the written Chinese to be translated is not too difficult or technical, it is probably better or more accurate or overall faster to use a word by word "instant" translation mouse pointer as provided by some PC software dictionaries like ( http://www.Dr eye) and then translating the rest of the document "manually". The end result of such a slower approach will always sound more natural especially if English is one's own or native language. :idea:
See this thread:
http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?t=14247
MIT Technology Review article on machine translation
The results here:
http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/mt/mt0 ... sults.html
Apparently, Google won.
http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?t=14247
MIT Technology Review article on machine translation
The results here:
http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/mt/mt0 ... sults.html
Apparently, Google won.
Thanks for the information.
Actually, my need is to get the gist of chinese document rather than to get a precise translation of it. Granted that no translation system will ever be able to replace human translator. But most of the time, I just need to figure out what the document is saying.
Will Transwhiz be a good software to meet my needs? Sorry, I wasn't clear on what I intended to do.
Regards.
Actually, my need is to get the gist of chinese document rather than to get a precise translation of it. Granted that no translation system will ever be able to replace human translator. But most of the time, I just need to figure out what the document is saying.
Will Transwhiz be a good software to meet my needs? Sorry, I wasn't clear on what I intended to do.
Regards.
Sharnyo, what if Transwhiz provided an inaccurate "gist", or a misleading one? What are the consequences of getting a wrong interpretation? Will it be serious? This is a risk that you have to bear or consider if you decide to use it.
I have a cousin who lives in China's factory belt, down south in Guangdong. He speaks Mandarin quite well, having lived in Taiwan for almost 10 years. He has never tried to read Chinese and his work consists of building relationships with traders in UK or Europe so most of his communication is in English or Russian. Now a factory in China cannot possibly run without anyone in "the management" being able to read Chinese! Because invariably you are bound to have the utility bills like: gas, electricity etc.. etc.., provincial govt communications, the occasional restaurant menus and bills etc.. all written in Chinese. Since it is too expensive to hire someone who is say 100% bi-ligual, what my cousin does is hire a (pretty) secretary, to help out. First you categorise all the different documents that come to the factory and only mark "Red" for any unusual or infrequently seen items. Such Red items are discussed once a month at the "board meeting" and depending upon the "urgency" the board meeting can be scheduled earlier or later.
Now I would say, the secretary does a fine job of "translating" because she "learns" as she goes, noting eg. which documents are important, which are urgent, which items the boss must know etc. Even though her salary is about the cost of a copy of TransWhiz per month (or maybe even less!), after a few months, she can even help out with other issues not related to document handling. My cousin of course no longer has to worry about "exceptions handling" and focus 100% on his customers abroad.
Even though some people say Chinese is a language which only uses about 3000 characters to express near 99% of all written communication, the reality is that most Chinese words are 2 characters or bi-syllabic. What this means it that if you want to write a computer program that captures all the possible meanings that these 3000 characters "in combination" of one, two or three or more characters represent is truly an enormous task. We are also talking about mapping symbols which have not only a "one to many" mapping relationship to the target language but a "many to many" mapping relationship!
Gato, thanks for the articles on Google /Mit review of translation software etc... I found them quite interesting. I am sure it is only a matter of time, with so much computing power at out disposable, mankind will eventually be able to tackle this problem. In the future we will be able to shrink the whole program down into a C3P-O! Or just call the robot Data ala Star Trek.
I have a cousin who lives in China's factory belt, down south in Guangdong. He speaks Mandarin quite well, having lived in Taiwan for almost 10 years. He has never tried to read Chinese and his work consists of building relationships with traders in UK or Europe so most of his communication is in English or Russian. Now a factory in China cannot possibly run without anyone in "the management" being able to read Chinese! Because invariably you are bound to have the utility bills like: gas, electricity etc.. etc.., provincial govt communications, the occasional restaurant menus and bills etc.. all written in Chinese. Since it is too expensive to hire someone who is say 100% bi-ligual, what my cousin does is hire a (pretty) secretary, to help out. First you categorise all the different documents that come to the factory and only mark "Red" for any unusual or infrequently seen items. Such Red items are discussed once a month at the "board meeting" and depending upon the "urgency" the board meeting can be scheduled earlier or later.
Now I would say, the secretary does a fine job of "translating" because she "learns" as she goes, noting eg. which documents are important, which are urgent, which items the boss must know etc. Even though her salary is about the cost of a copy of TransWhiz per month (or maybe even less!), after a few months, she can even help out with other issues not related to document handling. My cousin of course no longer has to worry about "exceptions handling" and focus 100% on his customers abroad.
Even though some people say Chinese is a language which only uses about 3000 characters to express near 99% of all written communication, the reality is that most Chinese words are 2 characters or bi-syllabic. What this means it that if you want to write a computer program that captures all the possible meanings that these 3000 characters "in combination" of one, two or three or more characters represent is truly an enormous task. We are also talking about mapping symbols which have not only a "one to many" mapping relationship to the target language but a "many to many" mapping relationship!
Gato, thanks for the articles on Google /Mit review of translation software etc... I found them quite interesting. I am sure it is only a matter of time, with so much computing power at out disposable, mankind will eventually be able to tackle this problem. In the future we will be able to shrink the whole program down into a C3P-O! Or just call the robot Data ala Star Trek.
Thanks Cao-ren. Yes, I would certainly rely on the secretary to sort out most incoming mails/documents. But there are a lot of cases where I don't have access to her. For example, on a trip or in email where I'd receive documents in chinese.
Wonder if anyone is in similar shoe. Or if anyone has ever used these translator software in this way?
Regards.
Wonder if anyone is in similar shoe. Or if anyone has ever used these translator software in this way?
Regards.
I use (and am addicted to) Transtar 7 for the desktop.
Hover over text, it will give word, sentence, and even full page translations. A little semi-transparent icon floats on the desktop, and you can drag and drop documents, words, sentences, etc., into the icon for translation either way. It does have an audio feature, but I'm not keen on it, because it's machine synthesized, which does little for me. But for translating and getting the gist of documents? Perfect. It's even got a "Sinicize the active window" feature, so that I can navigate Chinese programs and browse Chinese web pages (like Baidu and others) - as long as the text is really encoded into the page, and not just a graphic, I can read it in English.
I don't know how Transtar compares with other apps of its kind. It's the only one I've tried, and I love it...UNLIKE handheld stuff, until PlecoDict came along and rescued me from all my buyer's remorse.
Hover over text, it will give word, sentence, and even full page translations. A little semi-transparent icon floats on the desktop, and you can drag and drop documents, words, sentences, etc., into the icon for translation either way. It does have an audio feature, but I'm not keen on it, because it's machine synthesized, which does little for me. But for translating and getting the gist of documents? Perfect. It's even got a "Sinicize the active window" feature, so that I can navigate Chinese programs and browse Chinese web pages (like Baidu and others) - as long as the text is really encoded into the page, and not just a graphic, I can read it in English.
I don't know how Transtar compares with other apps of its kind. It's the only one I've tried, and I love it...UNLIKE handheld stuff, until PlecoDict came along and rescued me from all my buyer's remorse.