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

On 7/12/05 8:55, in article , "Martin
Brown" wrote:

snip
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.

Thanks to you and Phil for your advice and comments on this. But I think it
could start to get a bit too tangled for this sort of thing. If Rusty's
sister is willing to help, it would be great.
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove the weeds to email me)

Sacha wrote:
On 7/12/05 8:55, in article , "Martin
Brown" wrote:

snip

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.

Thanks to you and Phil for your advice and comments on this. But I think it
could start to get a bit too tangled for this sort of thing. If Rusty's
sister is willing to help, it would be great.

It depends a lot on how clearly you can write. If you write short
unambiguous sentences then you will get good results with machine
translation. Many modern technical words are the same in all languages
(except for those that have language police - French "Logiciel" for
instance).

At the very least you should ask the German collaborators to write to
you in German if it is much easier for them. It is unusual these days to
find German scientists without one of English or French as a second
language.

Regards,
Martin Brown

On 7/12/05 10:38, in article , "Martin
Brown" wrote:

Sacha wrote:
On 7/12/05 8:55, in article , "Martin
Brown" wrote:

snip

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.

Thanks to you and Phil for your advice and comments on this. But I think it
could start to get a bit too tangled for this sort of thing. If Rusty's
sister is willing to help, it would be great.

It depends a lot on how clearly you can write. If you write short
unambiguous sentences then you will get good results with machine
translation. Many modern technical words are the same in all languages
(except for those that have language police - French "Logiciel" for
instance).

At the very least you should ask the German collaborators to write to
you in German if it is much easier for them. It is unusual these days to
find German scientists without one of English or French as a second
language.

At this stage I'm writing to the head gardener at Pillnitz and he doesn't
have any English. The email they sent me yesterday apologised for the
delay but explained it was because they had to find a translator. He has
asked me several questions about the Camellia we have in our garden which
might be a clone of the one they have but as that's what we're trying to
establish, the explanations and descriptions are a little complicated. I
suppose it could go to scientists later and yes, I daresay they or someone
on their staff would speak English. But this initial contact is with people
who have no English.
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove the weeds to email me)