Subject: sum : german / english translation software

a little while ago i posted a query about peoples 's experience with power translator ( professional ) software for german - english translation . here is my colleague 's summary of responses via this and other lists . 1 . a second hand comment that someone working in art history had found it unsatisfactory 2 . another said that the canadian government uses the power professional ( french ) programme for translation work 3 . another said that the french version gave quite comical or incomprehensible results , but this was on the basic version , not the professional . one conspicuous difficulty was with words which can have the same form as different parts of speech ( eg gerunds ) ; another was variant word order . 4 . someone said ( another second hand comment ) that it was " ok for the first cut " . 5 . a response from the correspondent of an owner of the basic german programme who sent some samples with commentary , showing that as long as you knew both languages and edited the text during translation the results could be satisfactory , but whether the degree of efficiency offsets the time taken to use the programme was not apparent . this correspondent referred to it as a " toy " . 6 . a response from an academic who worked on the ibm translation product who referred to a german computer journal which rated the ibm programme slightly better ( and cheaper ) than the power professional . the reference is _ dos die pc zeitschrift _ 8 ' 95 pp128 - 132 . it is apparent that simple constructions and explicit vocabulary translate more accurately than the complex and allusive , so the satisfaction given will depend very much on the nature of the task and the needs or expectations of the user . for scanning large volumes of print to ascertain the general subject matter these programmes are probably quite satisfactory ; for accurate translations , interactive operation by a translation-competent person would seem to be necessary . i have not yet decided to buy one of these programmes : i await a sales person who is prepared to run the risk of a trial translation on text supplied by me . no satisfied user came forward . andrew carstairs - mccarthy department of linguistics , university of canterbury , private bag 4800 , christchurch , new zealand phone + 64 - 3-364 2211 ; home phone + 64 - 3-355 5108 fax + 64 - 3-364 2065 e-mail a . c-mcc @ ling . canterbury . ac . nz
