Hello and thank you for your comment John!
Recently I translated a program by a German programmer, which was translated in “Translate” in an approximately 30% volume. This 30%, which was already done, was so awfully made that I had to start all over from the beginning.
In my humble opinion and by my experience in translating among 4 languages I can say this:
For Latin born langs that have simplified the syntax and took off cases, a project like this sounds fine. In general, I would trust it as source and for my project, if my program needs translation for a file up to 200 strings. Among Italian, Spanish and English mostly this would sound like a standard perhaps. For languages with cases and more “old” grammatical forms, for which I wouldn’t like to trouble you, “translate” is a big failure. This is because most of people search google or easy automation tricks to fill in the empty fields. Or just make simple scripts for transcription without grammatical and syntactical care.
A simple example : 3 words in a row . It is important for Greek, Slavic langs with various number of cases, perhaps also for German, French and more for which I am not familiar with much, which is what. Is it the option of “a” that you get from “b”, or the option of “b” that you get your “a” from? There is also the “economy of digits and letters”. No programmer would like a description of many letters that sound funny over a description of less letters sounding properly. This would be the use of cases again.
Or it would sign a phenomenon of our era, of uneducated people abusing their own language and the languages they think they can speak. Have you ever been into a Chinese commercial page where terminology and plain dialogues simply not make sense? This is what I have seen automated translations make out of nice programs.
For a simple application, like a gadget for weather for example, I personally would handle such abuse, for a program I respect, use often and has important features for my computing lifestyle…. It just feels, sounds and appears as awfully made.
I don’t pretend my knowledge of English is great but I am confident how it sounds translated in Greek.
I have searched a git repository to hook up with sending files. I am a Git dummy. I was using it ages ago and after the changes I can’t find my way around easily. Could you please send me a link for submitting files? If I don’t find my way like this, will stick the translation to the “translation” project. I would like though some guidelines from someone how to translate some things.
My translation is complete. But we should consider the next. Every translation serves as a source for all the automatic translating projects. And since machines are not always fed with quality their product is likewise abusive towards languages. An AI model more likely would get data food from a programmer and not a translator’s or linguist’s experience.
