Three Golden Rules

Introduction

Most people's experience of using machine translation (MT) to translate text from one language into another is likely to be by using either Google (www.google.com) to translate a foreign-language web page, or a service like Babel Fish (www.babelfish.altavista.com) to translate a block of text.

But if you have used one of these services, you'll know that the results are often far from perfect. These services generally provide a general understanding, but are rarely fluent, often inaccurate and you certainly wouldn't want to use them to translate an important document from your language into another! So if there's so much of it being done, why is the translation quality poor?

The reality is that neither Google nor Babel Fish are good examples of what today's MT technologies can really achieve.

There is nothing wrong with the underlying MT technology - Translution use the same MT engines as these services. However these solutions are simply doing a literal sentence by sentence translation. They do not provide the ability to be configured to add any additional information that, when used, can dramatically improve the translation quality.

Translution recommends that users of its software follow 3 Golden Rules. Use of these rules will dramatically improve translation quality time after time. To see examples of how these rules have improved translation quality for our customers please click here.

The 3 Golden Rules

1) Examine your source document for translatability, and re-write if necessary.

Translution publish on their website some simple tips on how to write for translation. They also run training courses on how to use their software products including how to write for translation.

2) Mark up any text that you do not want translated such as names, places (i.e. Proper nouns).

Translution provides a facility for the user to mark up text within a specific document or e-mail that they do not want translated. It also provides Do Not Translate lists i.e. words which the user or the organisation would never want translated. Translution's dictionary creation services automatically capture terms that should not be translated from existing contact databases.

3) Create and use a dictionary which is "tuned" to your specific requirements.

Everyone uses words and phrases that, to them, have particular meanings. For example: parts lists, where a specific translation is required for an individual part description. All Translution users can easily set up their own User Dictionaries, which control how the translation is handled. Translution also provide dictionary creation services which can "capture" the vast majority of technical terms used in your organisation.