Free Language Translation
August 31, 2010 in cooperatives by admin
When a French company sent me an e-mail which I believed to be an enquiry about my services, I needed to get it translated into English.
A Google search on “language translation” quickly led me to a number of free translation services. In the end I investigated about 6 different programs.
All the free services used software which worked by translating each word from a dictionary. Some of the results were highly amusing, but not very helpful. What I discovered to be the difference between the useful program and the hopeless was the “topic dictionary”. If the software was capable of deciding on the topic it was translating the results were much better.
But beware! This type of software only works for translating from another language into your own language. You can tell reasonably easily if the translation makes sense.
When you try translating from your language into another language and then translate back into your own language to check the sense of your message the result will be a nonesense.
So, the good news is that there are software programs out there that can make sense of incoming messages, provided that they do not contain too much technical information or jargon. I decided to subscribe to a Desktop Translator service that provided an upgrade for only $3.50 a month which has proved to be really good value.
This has allowed me to read all my incoming mail and to do some research on the French company’s web site so that I could find out more about them, what their business was about and get a feel for whether they are the sort of company I would want to work with.
In the end I decided to use a human translation service to write my documents into French. Once again I did a fair amount of research before making my selection. I found a really good service who understand my business and are really enthusiastic about their work.
Business Coach David Ferrers works with blue chip companies and small businesses to help them develop their people, their effectiveness and their profitability. He publishes regular articles about a multitude of topics with the single objective of creating profit. His articles about translation services appear at Free Language Translation [http://www.squidoo.com/freelanguagetranslation]. His personal client portfolio includes: GM, J&J, Dell, Yves St.Laurent, Xerox, Prudential and P&O, plus many smaller companies.