Foreign Language Translation
Application Demonstration
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) web pages are published in English, but can be translated into other languages if they are set up to use foreign language translation. BNL is currently using Google Online Translation. If you see the translate drop-down shown above, then the page can be translated into another language.
This translation service uses enterprise level machine translation to dynamically translate our site on-the-fly into French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, etc. with no modification to the original HTML content. Readers may also use Google Online Translation to translate blocks of text, email or other individual websites.
As an automatic translator, Machine Translation works best when the text you wish to translate uses proper grammar. Slang, misspelled words, poorly placed punctuation and complex or lengthy sentences can all cause a page to be translated incorrectly. Automatic translators will allow you to grasp the general intent of the original, not to produce a polished translation.
Benefits
- This method allows for translation of the entire website which would otherwise be impossible due to limited resources. It does not, however, allow for the translation of PDF files, embedded text in images or translation of pop-up windows.
- Updates to content are processed when posted rather than delayed awaiting a human translation.
- Translations are handled uniformly -- rather than allowing for human interpretation -- one translator's choice may not be the same as another's. Many different dialects exist and a perfect translation is almost impossible -- this allows us to begin at the same point and improve as we can.
- The software can also be told when a word or phrase should NOT be translated -- leaving it as English if that is the most appropriate solution.
Issues
- Machine translation is not perfect and may create some poor translations.
- We are limited in what we can affect on the entire site -- we can enter individual words or phrases -- but not entire paragraphs or pages.
- We do not have the ability to create supplemental dictionaries -- such as proper names, mining terms, job titles and idiomatic expressions since we are using dictionaries used by the translation site.
Comments
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