We were talking about how best to handle the translation of our website JM2 Webdesigners during the past week. We have two choices (1) human translation of all current and future pages for every language manually or (2) have the computer do it for us. We opted for the computer translation which is quite good. What we decided we will post beneath each of the available options which we feel will help those of you that may need to have a translated solution on your website.
Human Translation
There are many companies that offer translation services and will almost always produce a better product than the computer translation almost every time. The reason than a human is better is that human languages are very sophisticated and complex with all of the possible constructs. The benefits of a human translator are:
- Primary language expertise
- Cultural sensitivity
- Human translators are experts in their individual language(s)
Computer Translation
With what we have researched the offerings that were available and the one we have chosen is from Bing (Computer Translation) as it covered the languages that we needed and provided the fastest turnaround and lowest cost of doing business. You will see at the top right of our page the Bing translation service. If you click this you can choose from a multitude of languages for automatic translation of any page on our website.
The key for an automated solution requires that the original text be as grammatically correct as possible, have complete sentences, concise and to the point.
The benefits of a human translator are:
- Fastest turnaround
- Over 99% accurate
- Ability to customize our own dictionary for the languages we need the translation to be as accurate as possible
- Ability for visitors to provide feedback on the translation (e.g. make the translations better for a specfic language)
There are several translators out on the internet. The major ones are:
- http://www.bing.com/widget/translator
- http://translate.google.com/manager/website/suggestions
- http://www.babelfish.com/
We chose to go with the automated computer translation service. The hard part was choosing between Google and Bing as both of these services do a word for word translation and don't take syntax of the language into account. Both of these services were both free for our general use with paid options for increased use. Both services could be incorporated because of our site design in a matter of minutes. In the end we opted for the Bing solution for translation services.
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