I imported large and high-quality translation memories that the client had given me, I extracted terminology from the source texts that I translated based on the data in the TM and defined grammatically, and I imported and fine-tuned glossaries. Plus, they were decidedly worse than what Google Translate would have given me.īut then I set out to work on it. And while they got better after changing some basic settings (such as the text genre and form of address for the user group), they still were not good and not much of a productivity boost for any translation effort. The translation results out of the box (language direction English into German) were really rather pitiful. I spent this last week training a rules-based machine translation engine (in this case, PROMT - Premium subscribers with access to the archives can read about this in the 184 th Tool Kit), and I finally understood a rather fundamental truth about MT (I've never claimed to be particularly particular quick-witted!).
Then again, maybe it's not important to be so exact in a sentence that trails off a list of titles with "and so forth."Īs I was updating my bibliography last week, I stumbled on a piece written eight years ago that felt somehow relevant in light of the last newsletter's article about "us" and our ill-defined identity as an industry. Let me know if you ever calculate the exact sum of tens of thousands and tens of thousands thousand. Anyone who knows a little Chinese will immediately recognize the longevity wishes for Qianlong as an attempt to translation the ubiquitous wan sui 萬歲 ( 万岁 ) ("ten thousand years"), but it still sounds comically bombastic to a modern English-speaking audience. So begins King George's flowery greeting to his letter presented to the Emperor Qianlong by George Lord Macartney in 1793. His Most Sacred Majesty George the Third, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Sovereign of the Seas, Defender of the Faith and so forth, To the Supreme Emperor of China Kien-long worthy to live tens of thousands and tens of thousands thousand years, sendeth Greetings.
Add xlif file to xbench archive#
New Password for the Tool Kit Archive (Premium Content)Īnyone interested in the language gem I unearthed during the last two weeks? Review of "Reviewing Reviewing" (Premium Content)ħ. A computer newsletter for translation professionalsĢ.