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Auto-translate entire Site - what is the best way?

wolfadeus

10:06 pm on Feb 28, 2010 (gmt 0)

I am thinking about doing translating a website from language x into language y (luckily my native language).

Now to accelerate the procedure, I want to use some automatic translation software and thought of google translate or babelfish. Ideally, the programm would replace only text and leave the HTML unafected; if I could then access the HTML code and copy-paste the body of each page into the template for the language-y-version, it would involve a lot of work, but would be "clean". At least that is what I imagine so far.

Does anyone here have experience with similar endeavours? Any advice or recommendations?

Leosghost

11:14 pm on Feb 28, 2010 (gmt 0)

Don't ..because you'll still have to check it anyway ( which takes as much time if not more as translating it yourself anyway )..and you'll think of better ways of expressing it whilst you translate it ..depending if your target audience is 16 or 60 years old etc ' and "autotrans" will only give you the equivalents that were "relevant" to the perceived socio-economic age group of the "autotrans" input programmer(s) ) ..yadda yadda ..

ie "untoad repro french style" :)

wolfadeus

6:00 pm on Mar 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

Well, I thought of autotranslating it and then proof-reading it myself. I think this would help to save time.

Leosghost

6:24 pm on Mar 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

It takes more time to delete bad autotrans and replace with good self trans' ..than it does to type correct self trans' to begin with ..and then the rest of what I said still applies ..

I've cleaned up auto trans for people ..could've done it better cleaner faster and optimised for SEO and specific target reader ( age , socio econimic , vocabularically challenged :) etc etc ) ..if they'd brought me the original text and not wasted time with auto trans ..
Plus ..auto trans doesn't respect your anticipated layout or prefered char count ..

wolfadeus

8:35 am on Mar 2, 2010 (gmt 0)

Right - I don't know about target groups, but I did a few auto-translations now to test it and the quality is in fact very low with both google translate and babelfish. Has anyone made good experiences with other services? English to German?

g1smd

12:46 am on Mar 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

You should not be 'translating' the text in the first place. Literal translations, even phrase translations will not read right and are likely to not use the right wording as used locally by the natives.

webcreationuk

3:09 pm on Mar 4, 2010 (gmt 0)

Auto-Translation will always be low quality, whether is about babelfish or google translate. :)