Sacha wrote:
On 6/12/05 17:33, in article ,
"Phil L" wrote:

Sacha wrote:

Does anyone here speak good German? If so, would you be willing to
translate a couple of short emails back and forth between us and
Pillnitz gardens? If so, please email me at


I don't speak German but I do have this programme which is very good:

http://www.translation.net/systran_professional.html

If we get botanic, which we might, would it cope with that, in your
experience?

Generally machine translation struggles a bit with specialist
vocabulary, but if you send the original English and the (eg Babelfish)
translation into German together then anything ambiguous they can look
at the English version for clarification. Ditto for their reply in
German you feed it through Babel and cross your fingers.

Poetry gets exceptionally mangled. But simple well structured sentences
using fairly common words and/or unknown or Latinate names do pretty
well. Unknown words are escaped in at the best guess position usually as
nouns or adjectives. Most of them started life translating computer
manuals and so fall back on that world model when all else fails.

Domain experts can usually get by talking to each other through it with
some minor hiccups. Short simple sentences work best!

New Scientist famously tortured one some years ago with a round trip
using Wordsworths "A host of golden daffodils" poem "host" became "CPU".

Online fragment at http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf122/sf122p16.htm

It is actually not all that far off considering...and they have improved
since then.

Regards,
Martin Brown