translation software

[adybee]

Hi,
Can anyone recommend any good translation software for english to spanish, italian & french and vice versa? I know that these are probably not as good as a professional translation service but unfortunately we have limited resources!

[Fawlty]

Hi:
I am in the same situation. I have checked out the web translation options and they really don't do a good job. In fact they are useless for building pages.

I cannot afford human translators so I am bugging friends and family to find people willing to translate the pages for me. I'm translating into 4 languages. I noticed that there was a Lutheran Church around the corner that offers German classes. I might approach them. My site is only 3 short pages so not a big hardship on anyone.

Be creative and resourceful.

To answer your question directy. Altavista, google and systransoft all offer web translation. They'll even translate the web page on the fly. But again, they really are useless.

Fawlty

[alpine]

Fairly complete listing of machine translation packages available for various languages:
http://www.foreignword.com/Tools/transnow.htm

Decent links and general info:
http://www.ericjarvis.co.uk/global.html

For smaller sites, I think the most reasonable options are systranlinks and worldlingo, but test the speed.

[edited by: Rumbas at 1:34 pm (utc) on July 23, 2003]
[edit reason] Delinked URL's [/edit]

[adybee]

Thanks guys - it is so difficult to find translation software that is any good. I might try one of the local Universities.

[ams_david]

Translation software can sometimes provide acceptable results, but a human brain is most often required to get good results.

Maybe you have a lot of human brains visiting your site already. If you gave them some simple online tools to translate your text into their favourite language, some may do it for free. Others might not want to translate, but would be willing to correct mistakes in 1st round translations. Many Open Source projects leverage their global user base like this -- no reason whole websites can't do it too.

The more your content interests the user, the more chance you'll get of free translations.

[adybee]

Thanks ams_david - I think this is a very good strategy that can work to our advantage as the nature of the websites is one of creating a community. I'm looking to translate our main website over the next few months and this should help.