Conference thebay::joyoflex

    >Unfortunately, in order to view these translations, you'll need a Web
    >Browser -- they use HTML markup to achieve the accented characters.
    
    Oh great, this company can't even produce a copy of mosaic that
    retains accented characters in the HTML markup.  (Yup, I see words
    like    E  s  p  a  square-box  l    just like in DECterm windows.)
    
    Not your fault of course.
    
    -- Norman Diamond

    Re .0: Dan, I've had a look at the French translation. I'd say it is
    practically unusable. However, under closer examination, one can see
    that most (but by far not all) of the problems come from the sentences
    where proper names and technical terms appear. All proper names that
    can be given any substantive meaning have generated surrealist
    translations. A good number of the technical terms have incorrect
    translations as well. If you look at the English text, you'll realise
    that this already makes most of the translation unusable. When you take
    all this into account, you still have another problem: English
    idiotisms give erroneous translations, and places where French
    idiotisms should take place look very queer to a French reader. With a
    text such as the one you have used, the general result is only
    understandable if you can compare it word for word with the English
    original (i.e. totally useless), but it will at least provide you a
    good laugh...
    			Denis.

Having looked at the German version I have to agree with Dennis.

Some errors are mindboggling as well, in the sense of 'how did the program
decide to come up with _that_'.

                                                        
                                                  - Rik -

    I made a conscious effort to read the French prior to the English and
    despite the fact that I thought it was grammatically pretty sound, I
    had great difficulty in general comprehension until I referred to 
    the English original.
    
    Far be it for me to poke fun at Denis here whose English is vastly
    superior to my French but I had to chuckle over the "idiotisms" comment.  
    Maybe this whole exercise should be regarded as an idiotism.
    
    /Chris.
    

    Re .4: Sorry, Chris, I incorrectly assumed the French word "idiotisme"
    also existed under the same form in English. A check in a dictionnary
    just taught me that English uses "idiomatic expression" instead. But
    the word sure gives a good feeling of what the French translation looks
    like. On further reading, I saw that there were also serious
    mistranslations that were not related to the two main causes I noted in
    my previous reply. It probably involves already quite a hell of a job
    to realise a translator able to come out with such a translation, but
    it still is not able to do the trick. I seriously doubt that even a non
    technical text without any misleading proper names would even approach
    something usable by an average reader.
    			Denis.

	Hi Dan!

	First of all I'd like to give you some short info about myself. I was
	born and rised in Argentina: I am a native Spanish speaker.
	For the last 12 years I am located in Israel - and this is only 25%
	of my life. 

	I read the raw Spanish version of the article on the INTERNET. I know
	the subject and was able to decipher the text. The translated words
	were standard Spanish. The syntax... well, there was no recognizable 
	Spanish syntax at all.

	In order to translate the article in question I'd need to go back to
	the English original. The raw translation is almost useless. It's 
	quality is that of any WASP high school graduate, with 2 years Spanish
	and a good Eglish-Spanish Dictionnary.

	It was very funny to see the VP of the USA being called Al "the Knife".

	I didn't see a problem with regionalisms or Jargon. The text was so
	un-natural that it was impossible to see if they were using a regional
	expression or jargon.

	Regards,

	Juan-Carlos Kiel
==============================================================================
>    
>    welcome.  I'm particularly interested in generalities like "Would even
>    the RAW translations (suitably augmented by obvious improvements in a
>    jargon dictionary) be of use?  

	I would not use the RAW translations for any use - but as making fun!


>    How good are the raw translations?  How
>    much would you pay...  

	I would suggest my company NOT to pay for such a translator, unless 
	other, better, translations would be brought as justification. Maybe 
	there are other kinds of text that suit better for their translation.

	JCK

    As a one-time interpreter from French and Spanish, I've sent Dan my
    detailed comments by mail. While I agree that the translations are
    laughable (I came across the French word `idiotisme' years ago and
    didn't bother looking it up in a dictionary because the context made
    its apparent meaning so appropriate, and I put it down as just another
    of those words that meant something clear but didn't translate well -
    I'm disappointed to know it means `idiomatic expression') I'd find them
    useful if I had to do a translation (in which case I'd have the English
    original alongside and - as others have said would be necessary - refer
    to that). If the service is going to be automatic, isn't the fact that
    these translations are raw irrelevant? Anything in an automatic system
    would have to be raw, therefore not very useful.
    
    I've never heard of Logos. Are they a big name? I read a newspaper
    article quite recently that said the biggest had just swallowed up the
    next biggest. The swallower or the swallowee was Global-something -
    Globalnet, perhaps (a PC package). But I doubt if `the best around' -
    even if the biggest were the best - could be useable; I've never seen
    an automatic translation that was of use to anyone but a translator.
    
    b