Hello Jeff.
Sorry for the late feedback.
I agree that the translated digests help non-English speakers to understand
the discussions and I am not very optimistic either about the quality of
translation services. IMHO, the Portuguese translation (I am Brazilian) is
quite poor because, similarly to the Spanish one, the sentences'
constructions look inverted, like in the example below:
"most of the big software, digital entertainment and telecommunications
companies"
is translated like "a maoria das grandes software, entretenimento digital e
telecomunicações empresas" and it should be "a maioria das grandes empresas
de software, entretenimento digital e telecomunicações"
I guess that it is a common issue when trying to translate Latin languages
to English - and vice-versa. In English, we commonly use adjectives followed
by substantives ("interaction design"), whereas in Portuguese and Spanish,
we normally have substantives followed by adjectives ("diseño de
interacción"/ "design de interação").
Maybe, if the translation tool could identify substantives and adjectives,
the outcome would be a lot better.
just my 2 cents :-)
cheers,
Laura
On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 5:59 PM, Jeff Howard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback everyone.
>
> Based off these comments and the comments off-list it seems like the
> translations are pretty universally lackluster--except for Swedish,
> which holds a special place in terms of incomprehensibility.
> Portuguese was the most well-received, but I'm not sure this type of
> thing makes sense for only one language.
>
> Google's API is fairly new, so just to be sure I ran translations
> from a couple other services (Systran for Spanish and InterTran for
> Swedish) and they didn't fare well. Itamar, could you share which
> service your students are using?
>
> I designed the digests to make it easier to consume the discussions,
> but this actually seems to make it harder. If you need to doublecheck
> the conversation in two languages it's not really worth the effort to
> read, especially if you have some comprehension of english.
>
> At this point, it seems like the translated digests would only really
> be helpful to non-english speakers. I'm not averse to that but I'm
> not sure how we would get this in their hands without some major
> outreach.
>
> If you know of other good translation services, I'd be interested in
> checking them out. I'll keep exploring the possibilities, but I'm
> not optimistic.
>
> // jeff
>
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> Posted from the new ixda.org
> http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=28333
>
>
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