Translation online

[Smeraldina Rima]

Looking to translate text automatically I'm having problems because of the text format on archive.org

The full text preserves hyphen run-ons and generally seems to leave gaps at the end of lines so that when I copy it to a translating site it messes up the syntax or splits the words. I can't copy text from the PDF where it's laid out more neatly although I expect there would be a way to get around that. Briefly tried to make it into a word file and got confused. I can just backspace each line but that gets annoying. What should I do?

Second question is for a large amount of text German to English is google translate the best option or are there others that do a better job of it? One thing I notice is that the hover/clarify synonyms function (very useful) disappears with a bigger chunk of text which is what I'm more inclined to paste in here.

Or are there some dirt cheap manual translating freelancers somewhere around the darknet? It's only for readability but I can't afford what I imagine any serious professional would charge for nearly 100 pages. Naturally if there is a Germanophile karmaslut you could have all the points going every day till one of us dies, hopefully me, hopefully, but probably you.

[Smeraldina Rima]

Should have done this as a Friday Fun Thread.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Translation websites have come a long way, and Google is probably the best one, but they're definitely far from perfect (translate something, then put the translation back in and see what it comes out with in English and you'll see what I mean). They're more of a rough guide than anything. They will never be able to work fully because of the problem of so many words and phrases not translating to other languages. You can't always just put a load of words into translate and then get the same meaning back in another language because there are too many words which have more than one meaning.

[Blumf]

The full text preserves hyphen run-ons and generally seems to leave gaps at the end of lines so that when I copy it to a translating site it messes up the syntax or splits the words. I can't copy text from the PDF where it's laid out more neatly although I expect there would be a way to get around that. Briefly tried to make it into a word file and got confused. I can just backspace each line but that gets annoying. What should I do?

There are tools that might help with this kind of stuff, but they have a bit of a learning curve (google: 'text processing' and 'regex' for a general idea/starting point)

[BlodwynPig]

i got my 69 year old Malaysian and 50 year old irish slaves to translate everything for me

[Smeraldina Rima]

Translation websites have come a long way, and Google is probably the best one, but they're definitely far from perfect (translate something, then put the translation back in and see what it comes out with in English and you'll see what I mean). They're more of a rough guide than anything. They will never be able to work fully because of the problem of so many words and phrases not translating to other languages. You can't always just put a load of words into translate and then get the same meaning back in another language because there are too many words which have more than one meaning.

Ah yes, the idea is to be able to understand the text then pass on the relevant bits to someone who can do it properly. For small stuff or a helping hand with language that I already recognise a bit I find them very useful. I take it for granted now. Imagine if Augustine had had google translate. I'll stick with that then - just wondered if I was missing a trick for large content translation.

There are tools that might help with this kind of stuff, but they have a bit of a learning curve (google: 'text processing' and 'regex' for a general idea/starting point)

Thanks for this. Also you managed to phrase that in a really nice way that didn't make me feel like an idiot.

i got my 69 year old Malaysian and 50 year old irish slaves to translate everything for me

I know a German but we've lost touch and I'd have to ease my way back in. How long has to have passed since you've rekindled a friendship before you can demand a hundred page translation without it being obvious?

[SetToStun]

There are tools that might help with this kind of stuff, but they have a bit of a learning curve (google: 'text processing' and 'regex' for a general idea/starting point)

Thanks for this. Also you managed to phrase that in a really nice way that didn't make me feel like an idiot.

I've been in IT for 30 years, 27 or so of them as a programmer, and regex still brings me out in hives. If you don't "get" regex, there is absolutely no shame in that. Trust me.

[Smeraldina Rima]

That does seem like it would have been beyond me. I can probably learn German in 27 years. Luckily someone pointed me towards an add-on for epub files. Problem solved.

[JesusAndYourBush]

I've translated a lot of Japanese over the last 10+ years using online translators and things have come in leaps and bounds since using babelfish (which doesn't seem to have improved). Google translate is by far the best. I'm always impressed on the small occasions I use it to translate a European language how eloquent the translation is compared with a more difficult language like Japanese which doesn't translate as easily.

One thing about line wraps I've found is if the text you're copying is from notepad that has word wrap on you get a new line character where there wasn't one in the original text so it always helps to turn word wrap off first before copying the text (as it might apply to other programs besides notepad.)