Comments on: Are blog posts lost in translation?

By: Mike Unwalla

Mike Unwalla — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:54:22 +0000

@techandlife: I note you use Google Translate in your sidebar so presume you feel it works okay as long as its translating international English.

Yes. Usually, international English gives satisfactory results with machine translation. On the TechScribe websites, most text is in international English. I use the term ‘international English’ for text that is optimized for MT. Other people use the terms ‘global English’, ‘Globish’, and ‘worldwide English’.

@techandlife: I guess the onus is on us to write clearly and proofread carefully to try and avoid the double meanings, idioms, etc you mention on your blog.

Yes. The best guidelines that I know about are in ‘The Global English style guide: writing clear, translatable documentation for a global market’ by John R Kohl, 2008 (ISBN 978-1-59994-657-3). For a review of the book, see http://www.techscribe.co.uk/ta/global-english-style-guide.htm. (Although the book’s title contains the word ‘documentation’, the guidelines apply to most business texts.)

By: techandlife

techandlife — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:59:31 +0000

Klaus, thanks for your comments. I think translation on the fly is what I want given the post by Amit on storing translations in the blog database.
I suspected Commentluv wasn’t working – I don’t think it ever has despite my best efforts. I’ll contact them about it.

By: techandlife

techandlife — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:53:07 +0000

Mike, thanks for that. I guess the onus is on us to write clearly and proofread carefully to try and avoid the double meanings, idioms, etc you mention on your website. Incidentally, I note you use Google Translate in your sidebar so presume you feel it works okay as long as its translating international English.

By: Klaus @ TechPatio

Klaus @ TechPatio — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:27:13 +0000

I use the Global Translater plugin just with a few other languages that I think would be nice to cover. They might give you some more hits from the search engines that you would not otherwise have received.

But of course the translations are not perfect – in most cases though, I think Google does a pretty good job so you at least will know what the important message of your post is.

The Google Translation Widget is cool though, but it will not let your content be indexed in search engines – it only translates “on the fly” as the user request it.

I also found that the Google widget could mess up certain javascript code, which is not so good.

PS: I don’t think your CommentLuv is working anymore. I can’t get it to pull any posts.

By: Mike Unwalla

Mike Unwalla — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 08:17:13 +0000

Quote: but are they really effective? Surely automated translation will never be as good as a human translation so are they worth it?

Automated translation is not as good as human translation. However, if source text is optimised for machine translation, machine translation gives satisfactory results.

In an evaluation, English text was translated into Spanish using Google Translate. Professional translators evaluated the machine translations. The machine translations have a satisfactory quality ( http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation-en-es.html ).