Translation software

harry the cat

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I'm currently having to translate documents and parts of documents, mainly from French to English and vice versa, although being able to do so with Spanish, German, Italian and other European languages would be useful. The length and complexity of some of the texts is too much for faffing with google translate and some of the documents are in PDF format.

Can anyone suggest a free or cheap software product, that I can use, preferably without sharing the content with the universe?

Ta.
 
Why don't you approach a language school or University where there will be many foreign students and see if any are willing to translate for you for a modest fee.
 
Ask Jet Jock what he uses to translate fact into fiction ...
 
Why don't you approach a language school or University where there will be many foreign students and see if any are willing to translate for you for a modest fee.

Why would you do that when you can get free and accurate translation software ?
 
Ta but appears to have limited formats, word, ppt, text, no sign of PDF?

I use it for work. All you need to do is highlight the text, press ‘control’ and cc and it translates for you. Any type of document. You then have the option to insert the translated text or copy and paste it. It’s very accurate with the translation both ways.
 
I use it for work. All you need to do is highlight the text, press ‘control’ and cc and it translates for you. Any type of document. You then have the option to insert the translated text or copy and paste it. It’s very accurate with the translation both ways.

Okay. Any limit on how many characters and will it do entire documents?
 
Okay. Any limit on how many characters and will it do entire documents?

I generally do it page by page if it’s a large document. The free version covers quite a few languages including Chinese and Arabic as well as a lot of the European languages. However, depending on what languages you need you may have to sign up to it. For the 12 or so languages I need it’s perfect.
 
I use it for work. All you need to do is highlight the text, press ‘control’ and cc and it translates for you. Any type of document. You then have the option to insert the translated text or copy and paste it. It’s very accurate with the translation both ways.

My daughter is 'near native' speaker in several languages, she is not particularly IT aware but when I asked her about auto translation she doubted its suitability / accuracy for formal docs, citing probs with context etc. I know she has friends who are 'on the books' with companies who specialise in undertaking translation work ~ why would such companies exist if auto translate didn't have short comings? Presumably you could let an auto translate pkge do the bulk of the work and then you could just kinda proof read / correct afterwards.
 
Why would you do that when you can get free and accurate translation software ?

Because there is no such thing as accurate and free automatic translation IMHO.
It also really depends on what the final use for the documents is (internal/external/marketing/etc).

Where I work at the moment, we use lingohub to translate user interface software strings. While the automatic translation is more than decent, it still needs "human supervision".

We also used Unbabel both for automated translation (for support tickets and such) that worked pretty much ok, but they can also provide human-based translations.
You can indicate what the document will be for, tone of voice, any potential guideline over styles or identity and they will provide an immediate quote. You can accept and put the document in a queue. Turnaround is pretty quick usually.
But this would not exactly be confidential I guess.
 
Why would you do that when you can get free and accurate translation software ?

There’s no such thing as free and accurate translation software. There is free translation software, but can you trust its accuracy for work related documents, etc. I suggest not.

Have a look at post number 15, it seems I’m not the only one with this opinion.
 
I've used Babelfish and GoogleTranslate for both personal and professional use. They seem adequate for most purposes.

Would I use them for translating instructions on how to defuse an atomic bomb? Probably not.
 
Software is not foolproof, there is no substitute for reading a document and translating it verbatim into another language.

I thought the whole purpose of specialist translators in different fields of expertise- was to avoid verbatim translations?
 


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