Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Advice on translating large Odt documents

Hi :)  
Ahh, i thought it was a typo for MT = Machine Translator

Firefox has a lot of different add-ons that are quite good MTs.  Quite a few combine Google 
Translate with various other engines. My current favourite is "Quick Translate" but for ages i used 
"Foxlingo" and "IM Translate" but there are others.  

In LibreOffice or OpenOffice got to 
Tools - Options - Internet - "Browser Plugin"
and tick the box in order to open ODF documents in a web-browser.  Then when you try to open the 
file or download it then it opens in the web-browser.  If you want to open a local file (on one 
your machine) or even on your network file-shares then you can right-click and choose "Open With 
..." and then choose to open the document in a web-browser.  

With "Quick Translate" when select an area or block of text or even a single word a spinning globe 
appears near the start of the selected text.  Clicking on that starts a spinning wheel in the 
bottom right and that eventually brings up a translation.  You can change the default language it 
translates into and the MT usually correctly guesses the language used in the web-page.


However i am sure everyone has examples of situations that MTs can't handle.  One stupid example is 
a story/joke in my country.
"A man and a giraffe went into a pub and both got very drunk.  The giraffe tripped over and fell 
asleep.  The man started to walk out the pub but the barman said "You can't leave that layin' 
there".  The man said "It's not a lion.  It's a giraffe" and left".  In normal speech people often 
use contractions so "laying" ends up sounding like "lion" but it also sounds like lying.  So now if 
someone accuses someone else of telling an untruth then another person might try to diffuse the 
tension by saying "It's not a lion it's a giraffe".  If the 1st person had wanted to avoid the 
tension then they would have accused the person of telling a giraffe, as in "that's a giraffe" or 
they might say "Pull the other one" (or the more complete "Pull the other one it's got bells on") 
in reference to a bizarre pagan ritual which has been trivialised over the centuries to the point 
of becoming a joke.  

One US president went to visit a certain war-torn city and wanted to say that he felt so much 
sympathy / empathy for their plight that he felt he almost was one of them.  Unfortunately he 
mispronounced it slightly and ended up saying something like 
"I am a small sausage"
So now when someone claims to be an inhabitant of anywhere they might accidentally (or 
deliberately) say it in such a way that various people laugh at the hinted reference although many 
people probably don't remember the original story, but might still find it amusing without really 
knowing why.  

There are some "not so funny" (means exactly the opposite of funny) examples such as when you 
finally get to an answer and solve a problem there is one combination of words that was the 
code-name of an "operation" to commit genocide.  A human translator would carefully avoid the 
phrase or quickly rearrange the words possibly resulting in something that looks clunky to people 
"with perfect English".  

Sometimes stories spring up in certain groups or at certain times and then might vanish shortly 
after or might so swiftly become so deeply embedded within the language that not using them looks 
clunky.  We now have "txtin language" (no e otherwise it changes the meaning) and 24/7 and a verb, 
"mobile" has become a noun.  


Machine translators are never going to be able to keep up with all of them because some appear and 
vanish too fast or are too subtle or has too many nuances some of which may have more or less 
strength due to context or recent events in the world.  Humans don't always keep up either but are 
more likely to have a good gut-feeling about which are worth avoiding in certain situations.  

Regards from 
Tom :)  





On Saturday, 12 October 2013, 1:39, Adolfo Jayme Barrientos <fito@libreoffice.org> wrote:
 
On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 6:52 PM, anne-ology <laginnis@gmail.com> wrote:

>         I don't know what the TradeMark [ what else is TM ??? ] is, but it

“TM” stands for Translation Memory. :-)

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