English to Chinese Translation Software

[Chong Yu Meng]

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Thanks for your observations on Chinese, dep ! :) I just need to clarify
a couple of things :

First, even though there are several dialects of Chinese, there are only
2 written scripts -- Traditional and Simplified. Traditional Chinese is
used by Hong Kong, Taiwan and quite a few other places where overseas
Chinese have migrated to. Simplified Chinese is used by mainland
("Communist" to you Yankees) China and a few other places, like Singapore.

There is a common spoken language that most Chinese (regardless of their
dialect group) will understand. This is called "putong hua" or "common
language", and Mandarin is the proper term for it, I believe. Though I
frequently refer to it as Chinese anyway. It is hard to find an analogue
in English -- the closest I can think of at this time is Pidgin English
and American/Queen's English.

Translation software can sometimes mangle the meaning badly. Especially
for technical subjects.

In any case, I believe it is relatively inexpensive to hire someone in
China to do the translation for you. A lot of Chinese I used to work
with can speak and write very fluently in English and Chinese. There was
this one engineer from Shaghai who spoke English with an American accent
! Actually, a good place to look for someone to do the translation
would be Shanghai.


~ --------------------------------------
~ Pascal Chong

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dep wrote:
| quoth James McDonald:
| | Any of my learned colleagues on this list know of some English to
| | Chinese translation software?
| |
| | My boss is looking hungrily at the markets of China and it appears
| | that he will need a program to translate his English to Chinese
|
| i do not think you are likely to find software that will do this, for
| several reasons. first is that there are numerous dialects, so
| "chinese" isn't a language per se. second, even translating to a
| particular dialect with software would be difficult without a
| brute-force program that uses a.e. to look at the context and figure
| out what is meant. third, no translation program works as well as a
| flesh-and-blood translator, at least not yet.
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