On 9/21/06, David Alexander Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
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.
The other problem is that unless you're really on the ball there will be mistranslations that you will miss. Something that seems to make perfect, coherent sense in English might be entirely different from what the original text meant, but all machine translators (and Google's is comparatively good, to give them credit) simply have a list of rules as to which Spanish/French/German/[insert as required] phrases translate into which English phrases.
Cynical
I don't really know what articles you all typically work on, but I've been concentrating on Mathematics articles, which I've noticed have fewer problems than a usual translation. Fortunately, the Pythagorean Theorem, which I'm working on right now, is available as an FA in two languages (de and fr), one of which I know well enough to make a translation, especially since a lot of the mathematics terms are spelling variations on the English (or vice versa, depending on how one chooses to look at it).
Carl