[Foundation-l] Parallel text alignment (was: Push translation)

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Sun, 8/8/10, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> This is where our experience differs. I'm working faster
> with the Google
> Translator Toolkit than without.


Whether "faster" or not is a function of a number of variables:


- How well do you know the languages and subject matter concerned? Do you rely on GTTK to give you some words you would otherwise have to look up? Do you trust GTTK in these cases, or do you double-check?

- How important is it to you that the target text reads well? How many compromises in terms of style and readability are you prepared to make, in order to be able to keep more Google output unchanged? 

- How fast can you type? Is it faster for you to type five words at the current cursor position, or is it faster for you to move your cursor position, take existing words in the GTTK output into the clipboard, and move them from the place where they are to the place where they belong?

- What kind of text are you dealing with? How complex is the sentence structure? GTTK will do better on simple sentences: "Take two eggs. Add 200g of flour and 150g of margarine. Mix everything in a bowl, using an electric mixer." However, the typical WP article does not have such simple sentence structures.


In the tests I made, I found I delete more than half, and even what I keep often has to be moved to a different place, does not have the right word order, or has wrong inflectional endings, making it quicker for me to type it from scratch than to copy it to the right place.

You won't find many professional translators using GTTK for their work. 

Where WP communities have complained about poor sentence structure and stilted expressions, this is likely due to translators editing the GTTK output as little as possible, so they can do more words per day, and, frankly, earn more money. 

If they are paid according to the number of words by Google, rather than the end customer, there is very little incentive for them to produce a text that the end customer will like, because the end customer isn't the one who's paying them.

A.