Translation Program???

[shifu]

Okay all, I'm looking for a good (actually working) program that can take PDF scanned copies of Chinese Book pages with Chinese Text and will convert same in to English text! Surely there must a be a program "out there" that can do this. Let me know???

[ironlady]

Best of luck with that. At this point, the best such mechanism I know is still called a "human translator".

[Confuzius]

Ya, dont exist.

[the bear]

C-E machine translation software that renders good quality English text is currently scheduled for release soon after the release of a working time machine.

[Tiger Mountaineer]

C-E machine translation software that renders good quality English text is currently scheduled for release soon after the release of a working time machine.

But seriously, Google translate, though still no replacement for a human translator, has made progress in the past few years, and is as good as any machine translation software I've used (Google docs can ocr pdfs and tranlate them afaik). They're now using crowdsourcing in the form of pull down menus over each translated term that allow users to choose the correct translation or add their own. Presumably, if enough people do this, their algorithms will get smarter over time.

[ironlady]

Presumably, if enough people who have a clue do this, their algorithms will get smarter over time.

There. Fixed that for you.

[lostinasia]

Presumably, if enough people who have a clue do this, their algorithms will get smarter over time.

There. Fixed that for you.

Hasn't this become a genuine problem with Google Translate - there have been too many crap translations, and the program is actually getting worse?

[Tiger Mountaineer]

Hasn't this become a genuine problem with Google Translate - there have been too many crap translations, and the program is actually getting worse?

Translators of Forumosa please weigh in... has it? Personally, it's gotten better in my experience. Five years ago it more or less just output gibberish. But then again, it may have already peaked, plateaued or started downhill lately. I don't use it enough to give a very informed opinion, but I find the crowdsourcing strategy interesting. Check out this talk on how they are repurposing the Captcha platform to translate the web at http://duolingo.com/.

[Chris]

I've seen Google Translate go through tremendous ups and downs in quality over the years.

The major problem with Chinese to English machine translation is that Chinese is a high context language. That is, a lot of information, such as who is doing the action, is assumed to be understood by the reader, and is omitted from the Chinese. Machines aren't able to interpolate the missing information well.

[the bear]

I'm redoing some seven-year-old ISO docs for my company at the moment. Some passages have obviously been put through an earlier iteration of Google Translate or else Dr Eye because the quality is much worse than what is produced now. I've proved this by entering the same text into Google Translate and comparing. So yeah, it's better, but not better to the point you would want to use it. I know there are some chancers who do "translation" by editing what GT spits out but my guess is they're delivering the finished product to translation mills who don't check the quality.