Hi :)  
Ahh, i thought it was a typo for MT = Machine Translator

Firefox has a lot of different add-ons that are quite good MTs.  Quite a few 
combine Google Translate with various other engines. My current favourite is 
"Quick Translate" but for ages i used "Foxlingo" and "IM Translate" but there 
are others.  

In LibreOffice or OpenOffice got to 
Tools - Options - Internet - "Browser Plugin"
and tick the box in order to open ODF documents in a web-browser.  Then when 
you try to open the file or download it then it opens in the web-browser.  If 
you want to open a local file (on one your machine) or even on your network 
file-shares then you can right-click and choose "Open With ..." and then choose 
to open the document in a web-browser.  

With "Quick Translate" when select an area or block of text or even a single 
word a spinning globe appears near the start of the selected text.  Clicking on 
that starts a spinning wheel in the bottom right and that eventually brings up 
a translation.  You can change the default language it translates into and the 
MT usually correctly guesses the language used in the web-page.


However i am sure everyone has examples of situations that MTs can't handle.  
One stupid example is a story/joke in my country.
"A man and a giraffe went into a pub and both got very drunk.  The giraffe 
tripped over and fell asleep.  The man started to walk out the pub but the 
barman said "You can't leave that layin' there".  The man said "It's not a 
lion.  It's a giraffe" and left".  In normal speech people often use 
contractions so "laying" ends up sounding like "lion" but it also sounds like 
lying.  So now if someone accuses someone else of telling an untruth then 
another person might try to diffuse the tension by saying "It's not a lion it's 
a giraffe".  If the 1st person had wanted to avoid the tension then they would 
have accused the person of telling a giraffe, as in "that's a giraffe" or they 
might say "Pull the other one" (or the more complete "Pull the other one it's 
got bells on") in reference to a bizarre pagan ritual which has been 
trivialised over the centuries to the point of becoming a joke.  

One US president went to visit a certain war-torn city and wanted to say that 
he felt so much sympathy / empathy for their plight that he felt he almost was 
one of them.  Unfortunately he mispronounced it slightly and ended up saying 
something like 
"I am a small sausage"
So now when someone claims to be an inhabitant of anywhere they might 
accidentally (or deliberately) say it in such a way that various people laugh 
at the hinted reference although many people probably don't remember the 
original story, but might still find it amusing without really knowing why.  

There are some "not so funny" (means exactly the opposite of funny) examples 
such as when you finally get to an answer and solve a problem there is one 
combination of words that was the code-name of an "operation" to commit 
genocide.  A human translator would carefully avoid the phrase or quickly 
rearrange the words possibly resulting in something that looks clunky to people 
"with perfect English".  

Sometimes stories spring up in certain groups or at certain times and then 
might vanish shortly after or might so swiftly become so deeply embedded within 
the language that not using them looks clunky.  We now have "txtin language" 
(no e otherwise it changes the meaning) and 24/7 and a verb, "mobile" has 
become a noun.  


Machine translators are never going to be able to keep up with all of them 
because some appear and vanish too fast or are too subtle or has too many 
nuances some of which may have more or less strength due to context or recent 
events in the world.  Humans don't always keep up either but are more likely to 
have a good gut-feeling about which are worth avoiding in certain situations.  

Regards from 
Tom :)  





On Saturday, 12 October 2013, 1:39, Adolfo Jayme Barrientos 
<f...@libreoffice.org> wrote:
 
On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 6:52 PM, anne-ology <lagin...@gmail.com> wrote:

>        I don't know what the TradeMark [ what else is TM ??? ] is, but it

“TM” stands for Translation Memory. :-)

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