Automatic Translation Script?

I want to have a real-time Chinese -> English translation. I only need to
translate 1 sentence to 1 sentence, because I want to display Chinese News
Headlines in English. No paragraph translated. Does anyone know a link, web
service, script, to do that? Thanks

<SaveWorldFromAids@alexa.com> wrote:
: I want to have a real-time Chinese -> English translation. I only need to
: translate 1 sentence to 1 sentence, because I want to display Chinese News
: Headlines in English. No paragraph translated. Does anyone know a link,
web
: service, script, to do that? Thanks

I wouldn't trust any automatic translator for that. For examples of why not,
see:

http://www.provis-translations.com/f...anslations.htm
http://www.proz.com/home/20424/deen.html
http://www.funny.co.uk/keywords/lati...nslations.html

Find someone who speaks Chinese and English to translate for you.

Lois

> I wouldn't trust any automatic translator for that. For examples of why not,
> see:
>
> http://www.provis-translations.com/f...anslations.htm
> http://www.proz.com/home/20424/deen.html
> http://www.funny.co.uk/keywords/lati...nslations.html
>
> Find someone who speaks Chinese and English to translate for you.

The above translations are not from Chinese to English: they are far
too polished. I actually doubt many are machine translations at all.
Regardless though, bashing machine translation because of its
limitations is unhelpful... while the current crop of Chinese-English
translation systems won't win awards for style anytime soon, they
perform a useful service to those unable to afford professional
translation services -- something particularly expensive between Asian
and Romance languages.

Probably the best resource on the Internet for Chinese-related
computing tools is run by Erik Peterson at:
http://www.chinesecomputing.com. If someone reads Chinese, there are
also a growing number of free dictionary services that can be used to
look-up/parse small chunks of text. Since most of these tools rely on
the same back-end wordlist (CEDICT), they are of limited use to
non-students. A particularly nice one is:
http://82.182.78.97/dictionary/.

For translating news, you will need software with a larger wordlist.
Here, Systran probably has the most accessible software. They power a
number of free translation sites, including Babelfish and Worldlingo.
TranSphere apparently has a $2500 product, but I haven't tried it. The
most well-known Chinese software is Kingsoft. It claims to have
Chinese-English translation capabilities and is the cheapest
commercial solution, but I can't find any examples of output online.

For a more low-cost solution, there is an open-source project (mine,
actually) at: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~david/chinese/adso.html.
This is designed to be primarily of use to language students, but
isn't bad at the gist-translation of non-complex sentences. It's
grammar is fairly primitive when it comes to long or run-on sentences.

Regardless of which tool you use you'll inevitably have to develop a
specialized bilingual wordlist before the translations will start
being meaningful. And even then it would be a good idea to have a
native English speaker edit the output. Whatever solution you use, if
you still find the output unintelligible, try contacting your local
university and hiring a student of the language to polish the output
for you. You will likely find that a more economical solution that
hiring professional Chinese-based translators.

"Lois" <auto-newsgroups@wordsweave.com> wrote in message
news3TOc.217$zC1.119@fe39.usenetserver.com...
> <SaveWorldFromAids@alexa.com> wrote:
> : I want to have a real-time Chinese -> English translation. I only need
to
> : translate 1 sentence to 1 sentence, because I want to display Chinese
News
> : Headlines in English. No paragraph translated. Does anyone know a link,
> web
> : service, script, to do that? Thanks
>
> I wouldn't trust any automatic translator for that. For examples of why
not,
> see:
>
> http://www.provis-translations.com/f...anslations.htm
> http://www.proz.com/home/20424/deen.html
> http://www.funny.co.uk/keywords/lati...nslations.html

You forgot to mention http://www.engrish.com/


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