Hi

I am looking to globalise my health and fitness website, and plan to utilise my wife's Portuguese and Spanish language skills. So far I have used Google translator to change the index page. The plan being that I will auto translate pages, then my wife will edit them. However, at first glance, Google's translation is very poor. I tried again with Yahoo Babel, and the results are certainly different, although as yet they have not been reviewed.

Has anyone produced a list of the best translation services for different languages. I plan to do English to Portuguese and English to Spanish, but if i can find a good service, I want to do French and German too, and then expand into China. I know that the best option would be to manually translate each page from the outset, but really we do not have the resources for that, so want to auto translate and then manually edit afterwards.

Also, is there any preferred way to link between the pages?
My first page in action: Motley Health - Fitness, Musculação and Perda de Peso

Cheers

Jon.

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Going Global : Motley Health

Manually translating them is probably less work then automatically doing so and then editing them. It will also cause you far less pain looking forward.

I would shy away from any automation and translate & localize them yourself, it might go a lot slower but at least you will be left with a page worthy of existence.

I must agree with Peter - keep away from auto-piloting your translations. It's a nightmare.

There is an important aspect you must take into account appropriate keyword migration from one language to another - automatic translation just wont do this for you ...

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Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

Yep, that is becoming apparent, but I am still using the translations tools. My wife (native Portuguese) is amending the pages that I auto translate. There are loads of crazy errors and phrases that make no sense, but she says it is still better than translating the whole page from scratch. Reading and re-writing sentences is easier and quicker.

Big job, doing it one page at a time. I have now translated my menus in the port'n'cheese section, and although most point to English pages, some now point to the port. pages. Does this look OK to you?

eg. on Motley Health - Fitness, Musculação e Perda de Peso the only portugeuse pages are Como Tirar a Barriga and A dieta Bruce Lee. Will this confuse things, in that many links go to English sites, or is this a logical first step?

I have added some translator flags to the top of the page, so any portugeuse speakers that suddenly find themselves in an English site can translate with google.

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Going Global : Motley Health

jonbey - your wife might well be advised to invest in some machine translation software which works in a different way in that it assists the human to translate taking the hard work out of the process - but it's not an auto-translation process. Andy

I spent many years working on and with a range of different automatic translation tools and have expert certification on some of them
See my Machine Translation (MT) tips page and my Language Evaluation Technology website.
There are also 3 Yahoo forums (SYSTRAN_users, Reverso_users, PROMT_users) for these brands of automatic translation software/systems.

A few of my short articles are provided below on how to go beyond the basic online portals (BabelFish, Google), which were not intended for translation postediting touch-up work, and use the software packages:

Getting started with Machine Translation. By Jeff Allen. In the special supplement "Guide to Translation" of MultiLingual Computing & Technology, Number 69, Volume 16, Issue 1. January/February 2005. pp 8-12
click here
Summary: This is a step-by-step guide on how to transition from an free online translation portal like Babelfish or Google Tools to using a commercially MT software package which includes sets of productivity-related features.

Case Study: Implementing MT for the Translation of Pre-sales Marketing and Post-sales Software Deployment Documentation. By Jeff Allen. 6th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA 2004, Washington, DC, USA, September 28-October 2, 2004. pp 1-6.
click here
Summary: This is a 6-page case study which provides clear evidence of the use of MT for important customer facing documentation.

Improved Translation Quality with Machine Translation Dictionary Building. By Jeff Allen. June 2006.
click here
Summary: This article describes a project which specifically aimed at improving the quality of Machine Translation (MT) output by creating a custom user MT dictionary. Productivity results are provided as well as examples of the resulting output.

Postediting: an integrated part of a translation software program. By Jeff Allen. In Language International magazine, April 2001, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 26-29.
click here
Summary: This is a short 3-4 page paper which provides productivity measurements on using the PROMT-based Reverso Pro 4 software program for translating a series of marketing brochures.

What is Post-editing? By Jeff Allen. Translation Automation Newsletter, Issue 4. February 2005. 2 pages.
click here
Summary: This is a short 2-page paper on the status of MT postediting which provides some productivity measurements of postediting without dictionary building.

Post-editing. By Jeff Allen. In Computers and Translation: A Translators Guide. Edited by Harold Somers. Benjamins Translation Library, 35. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2003. (ISBN 90 272 1640 1).
click here
Summary: This is a book chapter which defines the different levels and types of MT postediting (the touch up editing step after MT processing). MT postediting can be done with or without MT processing using custom dictionaries.

Hope that helps,

Jeff Allen
LinkedIn: Jeff Allen

I have found something , look at this


Website Translation by PROMT

PROMT offers free Website Translation service for English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Italian and Russian languages. The service is powered by @promt 7.0 translation software.

All the text content of Web site will be translated including hyperlinks and picture titles. Also, the original Web site layout is preserved in translated pages and linked pages will be translated automatically when you navigate to them.

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My experience is the contrary to that of your wife. The errors are so many that you spend more time going back to the original text to get the meaning and then correct the translation that it's not worth it.

Wordreference is a good resource if you only have problems with one word of phrase, as it has a forum where you can get some help.

Jefallen has given a lot of useful info on automatic translation tools, so I won't add to that.