On 21/09/06, Carl Peterson <carlopeterson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
While I know using online translators is discouraged,
if a person is
familiar enough with a subject to be able to root out mistranslations and to
rewrite it as coherent English (good prose in one language doesn't
necessarily make good prose in another, hence the "it looses something in
the translation" cliche), then I don't see why familiarity with another
language is necessarily a requirement. I've found with the couple of
articles I've looked at through Google's translation service that it does a
passable job, especially if one is familiar with the the subject matter. The
nice thing about Google's translator is that if you click a link on the
translated page, the linked page will be translated for you as well.
I've tried this. It's somewhat better than nothing. But mostly I've
only used it for expanding a bare stub and only in an area I'm already
familiar with, and even that's too painful to do much.
- d.