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Harold Mansfield
03-24-2009, 01:55 PM
I get a lot of Press releases and promos from different countries. Most of them have an English version when they send it to me, but a few either don't understand my requests, or don't have the material translated...most of those are Dutch, German, Polish and Japanese.

Is there an online "copy and paste" tool that will translate copy into English, or is there a tool on a windows computer that will do it that anyone has used successfully ?

Any help is appreciated.

KristineS
03-24-2009, 03:05 PM
There's the Babel Fish Translation program. I've used it in the past. It isn't the best translation, but you can usually get the gist.

Babel Fish (http://babelfish.yahoo.com/)

billbenson
03-24-2009, 03:07 PM
I can tell you this, Spanish to English translators make a lot of errors. I would expect the languages you mention to be even worse.

vangogh
03-24-2009, 03:52 PM
Babel Fish (babelfish.yahoo.com/) is one. Google translates pages too. You have to be careful though. Translation tools aren't that great. They can translate the words, but not the subtleties of language. If you take something in English, translate it to another language, and then translate it back to English you'll see what I mean.

I took the first paragraph of your original post, translated it to Spanish and then back to English. Here's the result


With himself many official notices of press and promos of diverse countries. Most of they have an English version when they send it to me, only some any don' t understands my requests, or don' t has the translated material… most of those is Dutch, German, Polish and Japanese.

Harold Mansfield
03-24-2009, 05:19 PM
I took the first paragraph of your original post, translated it to Spanish and then back to English. Here's the result

Oh God...that's pretty bad. If that's the best i can do, that just means more work rewriting them.

Or i could just post them in their original form and hope my readers are smart enough to hit the American flag on the right to translate...but that would probably confuse too many people and it would still be crappy.

I don't know why I assumed that companies that do business internationally had at least one person that spoke English working for them.

vangogh
03-24-2009, 05:47 PM
That is translated twice so it's probably worse than the one time translation. I think the only way to really offer content in more than one language is to hire someone fluent in both to rewrite the content.

Even U.S to U.K English has differences that call for rewrites to be effective.

seolman
03-24-2009, 07:47 PM
being in Costa Rica we don't have any problems in Spanish/English but we have done work in French, Dutch and German. In these cases we simply have to let the client know the burden is on them to get us a good quality translation. And even then we sometimes get the Babelfish gobbledy gook...which can be very entertaining.:)

vangogh
03-24-2009, 08:15 PM
Dave I always have fun translating things back and forth to see what comes back. eborg's paragraph us actually not too bad compared to some others I've tried.

vangogh
03-24-2009, 10:20 PM
In an odd bout of good timing, I found this post on using translation tools for search (http://www.seo-theory.com/2009/03/24/using-translation-tools-for-search/) and thought it relevant to the conversation.

billbenson
03-25-2009, 02:03 AM
It gets even worse with dialects. In Spanish (I comment on Spanish because I speak the language), a common phrase in one country is a sexual act in another. If you are not very careful, you can say something offensive. I've heard that different regions of China can't understand each other. I have no idea if that is accurate or not.

So, not only do you need someone who speaks both languages, you may need someone who can transelate to a neutral version of the other language.

Harold Mansfield
03-25-2009, 02:24 AM
It's all too much trouble. I think I'm going to stay with seolman on this one. It's up to them to get me the information in English.

vangogh
03-25-2009, 02:57 AM
People here in the U.S. can't always understand each other either. Compare any accent from the north east with one from the deep south.