Translating a German technical specification into English

Translating a German technical specification into English

[Jason White]

I have an INKA braille display from BAUM Products GmbH, and Nicolas has
generously offered to write a BRLTTY driver to support it. However, the
documentation describing the communications protocol used by the braille
display is written in German. I have given it to several people during the
past few months, each of whom had volunteered to translate it; but they
quickly changed their minds after looking more closely at the text.

Hence I would like to raise the following question: how can I find someone
who would have the time and expertise to translate this material. The
document is not meant for public distribution, but I have specific
permission for it to be made available for translation purposes, and for a
BRLTTY driver to be written.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Jason.

Translating a German technical specification into English

[T. V. Raman]

have you tried the automatic altavista translator?
it produces pretty bad english given good German, but it
might be a reasonable start for a technical manual.

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

      Adobe Systems                 Tel: 1 (408) 536 3945   (W14-612)
      Advanced Technology Group     Fax: 1 (408) 537 4042 
      (W14 129) 345 Park Avenue     Email: raman@adobe.com 
      San Jose , CA 95110 -2704     Email:  raman@cs.cornell.edu
      http://labrador.corp.adobe.com/~raman/        (Adobe Intranet)
      http://cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/raman.html    (Cornell)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own and in no way should be taken
as representative of my employer, Adobe Systems Inc.
____________________________________________________________

Re: Translating a German technical specification into English

[Jason White]

Hans kindly translated the protocol documentation into English.

As an aside, a few months ago I tried the Altavista translation service,
as follows. I took a few sentences from a philosophical text by Jacques
Derrida which I happened to be reading, and set the software to translate
from French to English. The results were laughable. Admittedly however,
this text would also be difficult for a human being to translate.

Incidentally, are there any freely available translation products for
Linux? Are there any German and English dictionaries in a form that can be
read from within the Linux environment. I find that modern CD-ROM
applications are problematic in so far as they will only operate under
MacOS or MS-Windows.

Re: Translating a German technical specification into English

[T's Mailing Lists]

There's an excellent online dix, of course you have to be online, but it
could be queried from a perl-script or such... :

http://dictionaries.travlang.com/

*
t

On Tue, 30 Jun 1998, Jason White wrote:

[cut]
> Are there any German and English dictionaries in a form that can be
> read from within the Linux environment.
[cut]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Tomas Pospisek - Freelance: Linuxing, Networking
                      http://spin.ch/~tpo/freelance
         www.SPIN.ch - Internet Services in Graubuenden/Switzerland
             WANTED: sysadmin-> http://spin.ch/~tpo/joboffer
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Translating a German technical specification into English

[wlestes]

> Incidentally, are there any freely available translation products for
> Linux? Are there any German and English dictionaries in a form that can be
> read from within the Linux environment. I find that modern CD-ROM
> applications are problematic in so far as they will only operate under
> MacOS or MS-Windows.

You might try http://www.dict.org/

They have released their software and dictionaries. The software is
gpl'd. Much of the dictionary material is public domain or otherwise
usable. For the announcement of that, look in the
comp.os.linux.announce archives. While I personally have not installed
the packages (It's on my TODO list), I have the impression that it
works quite well. As far as I know, it's all english language
material, but... and their "Webster's" is from 1913--it was public
domain.

--will