Chinese to English Translation Software for Medical Book Translation

lukeskywalker
June 08, 2008, 07:51 AM posted in General Discussion

Hi all:

I am planning to translate a medical book from chinese to english. My plan was to run it through a good Chinese to English translation software first and do corrections afterwards.

Any advice on what such a good software may be?

Is it easy to get in Beijing? preferably near Zhongguancun?

What other advice can anyone suggest to ease the work?

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xiaohu
August 11, 2008, 04:17 PM

Lukeskywalker:

(how's your Midiclorean rate?  Not meaning to brag or nothin' but mine's an 8.8! JK!!!)

My best advice to you would be to NOT run the book through a translation software first.  That kind of software only runs at THE MOST 80% accurate, but with complex medical terminology it will run more like 60% accurate.  You'll be going back through to make so many corrections in random places and fixing up so much of the bad translation it would have been better to start from scratch to begin with.

By the time you get halfway into it, such deep frustration will set in that you'll wish you were Bantha fodder, or willingly have yourself thrown into the pit of Carkoon. (sorry for all the stupid Star Wars references, I don't mean to be such a scruffy Nerf Herder!)

:)

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lukeskywalker
August 12, 2008, 03:59 AM

小虎, 你好! 太谢谢你的答案!

Just googled Midiclorean rate in case a popular precise metric of "The force" had emerged that I was not aware of. Got 5 links, including this one at the very top.

Or are you playing on the luke-lucky-8.8 chinese numeralogy number connection?In this case, I'll raise the one-upsmanship and push mine to 8.888888

See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/odd_baby_eights

to figure this one out.

 

Could any one venture a translation of Midiclorean rate?

Note to myself: Star Wars= 星球大战

 

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goulnik
August 12, 2008, 11:34 AM

lukeskywalke, where do you get the online version of the medical book from? Also, is it about 中医 (TCM) or 西医 ?

I'm curious because I've been typing in the full content of 对癌症说“不”─百名癌症患者故事, couldn't find it online, so it will take a few more months, only English content being the subtitle 'Say "NO" to Cancer -- 100 Stories by Chinese Cancer Patients (admitedly not a medical book per se but related).

 

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lukeskywalker
August 13, 2008, 03:27 AM

goulniky, it's a book about paralytic polio surgical treatments. Such a speciality has virtual disappeared in western countries due to the eradication of polio. In China, still 2Million people suffer from it and customized solutions exist. However in underdeveloped countries in Africa and Latin America, awareness of the possibities is non-existent.  I am  in touch with the leading chinese specialist on this who has published  his surgical solutions in a recent Chinese book.

I would get the file directly from him.

I hope this would help raise awareness in the medical communities of these undeserved regions.

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cnlingo
May 27, 2017, 12:47 PM

You don't need any translation software, you just needed Google - if you indeed need a machine translation. 

AI (artificial intelligence) is getting more and more advanced, and now we see the GNMT (Google Neural Machine Translation) coming alive.

I am working in the language industry. AI indeed presents both a challenge and an opportunity to human translators and translation agencies. Challenge because a percentage of the translations works might be "taken over" by the machines (this has already started), opportunity is that it cuts out some tedious or repetitive parts from the work loads. Google is undoubtedly the top leading player in AI translation but to my personal experience with the language pair of English<>Chinese Mandarin, despite that it may perform quite accurately with single words and short phrase (a good digital dictionary could do that as well), it's still far below expectation you would expect from an experienced human translator when dealing with longer "complex" sentences.

I see you were trying to translate a medical book. Are you sure you want to run it through GNMT first? It won't really save much of works if you care about the quality of the final output...