Translation tools for using the forum

[ScoutB]

Thought it could be useful to have a thread on what sorts of machine translation tools people find useful.

Are there practical ways to translate the threads on here to another language and translate responses back to english for posting? I guess Chrome can translate webpages in place, does it work alright on S4ME? Or are there better options?

Also into any other translation tips people want to share. For example, is there a trick to get Chrome to translate a local pdf the way it does a website?

 

[Peter T]

This is not necessarily a recommendation, but I just cut and paste into the Google Translate app. I tend to use it with French and German more, both of which I speak a little. I use it sentence by sentence so I can play around with testing some sentences where I am less trusting of the outcome, doing reverse translations or reverse translations with alternative English wording.

A German friend produces all his publicity material in French, German and English and often sends me his English translations to quality control the result. Though in theory I am just checking the English, I prefer to also have the original German so I can check different translations if I am unsure of the intended meaning at any point. It surprises me how good Google Translate generally is; my friend a year or so ago used a commercial translator service for a document where the resultant English was so bad, he would have been better off just using an app. Obviously you still can not fully trust the result if you do not has some way of checking, so when I use it for other languages, such as Swedish, I would not want to base anything important on the output.

Obviously there are much more efficient alternatives. My approach is quite slow, but it suits me as the longer any material is, even in my native English, the harder it is for me to process. So this slow sentence by sentence method increases my confidence in the translation but also aids my understanding of the outcome.

Also I don’t have the need to translate my own comments on S4ME as I am composing them in English. When translating my output into French or German I again do it just phrase by phrase, so I can test the out put by using different wordings.

 

[Wits_End]

The feeling in the profession, I think, is that machine translation tools may actually get worse rather than better, as the engines are starting to feed off AI-generated "translations" now. Certainly it's been commented that the output from DeepL appears to have got worse in recent months. What you need to be most careful about is that machine translations are now reading very fluently and may seem credible, but can be far from correct!

GT and DeepL are probably the most widely used for European languages (I'm not sure just how many DeepL covers these days), but the output is variable, and I'm not sure how well either would do for something as specialised as ME/CFS. You can train custom MT engines on specific fields such as medical, but I imagine that costs money. Mind you, I'm not sure how much GT and DeepL will allow you to do these days without charging you or requiring blood in some other form ...