On 21/09/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
While I know using online translators is discouraged, if a person is familiar enough with a subject to be able to root out mistranslations and to rewrite it as coherent English (good prose in one language doesn't necessarily make good prose in another, hence the "it looses something in the translation" cliche), then I don't see why familiarity with another language is necessarily a requirement. I've found with the couple of articles I've looked at through Google's translation service that it does a passable job, especially if one is familiar with the the subject matter. The nice thing about Google's translator is that if you click a link on the translated page, the linked page will be translated for you as well.
I've tried this. It's somewhat better than nothing. But mostly I've only used it for expanding a bare stub and only in an area I'm already familiar with, and even that's too painful to do much.
- d.