Hi there people,

My italian language is very basic - I just know all the swear words and how to pull a girl..possibly..haha

I go to Udine a lot as a tourist. I'm from London.

Ok so I'm planning a business - a summer school project for teenagers from Europe. I need some help as my website I wish to translate into italian. There is roughly 11 pages.

Is there anyone here willing to offer their services?

Obviously I would require that you are italian to get the real grammer and feeling.

Thanks

Hi um4r:

This sounds like a professional job - 11 pages worth of translation. You might check out ProZ.com - it's a website that lists freelance translators. You can submit your job and qualified translators can bid on it.

Good luck.

If I were you, I would approach it a paragraph at a time by starting with Babelfish I would then use Babelfish to retranslate the result back into English to see what is sounds like. Then make changes and do the translation again.

Finally after I had done all the paragraphs, I would get a professional review/edit of what you are trying to accomplish.

Bill

I would never ever rely on Bablefish for anything more important than a postcard with greetings only on it!
11 pages translated by a qualified translator are not a huge amount of money and a serious translation does make the difference!

I must say - I agree with Giulia. Babelfish is pretty primitive. So far, no automized translation software has been able to approach what real people can do. Language is so complex - nuance, tone, context.

Sure, for something very short and simple, Babelfish might suffice, but for a longer document, I don't think so.

And, believe me, nothing is more off putting than badly translated texts for websites!!!!!

My opinion is that if the advertiser can't be bothered to get a proper translation then he/she won't be bothered about the quality of their product either.

Many Italian (not only, but they're the ones I use the most) websites have English translations which are downright pathetic. Anyone reading them (after having a good laugh) could be put off because they are poorly constructed, poorly translated and often totally ambiguous.

My latest giggles have been:

latte scremato = screamed milk
many loans in front = big lawns
alberi secolari = secular (?) trees??? I think they meant 100 year old ones

Get yourself a decent translator. Babelfish just will not do. If you're going to do it, do it properly!

Hey, lighten up!
I did not suggest using Babelfish to build his website.....if you will read my post again you'll see I told him to get professional translation as the final product. I think doing it as I have suggested will give him an appreciation for the weaknesses of machine translation as well as convenience for some purposes. The re-translation process can be an eye-opener, as Valda points out.

By the way, have you seen the article in Scientific American about the future for machine translation based on statistical methods rather than SysTran?

Bill

Let's be honest Babelfish is worse than useless, even in simple cases:

eg Fammi vedere come guidi.
translated by Babelfish into:
it makes to see me like guides

if you then feed this back into Babelfish and ask it to go back to italian you get:
esso marche per vederle come le guide

Confusion compounded!!
It really is a waste of time.

I definitely agree with Valda, a bad translation is worse than no translation at all and it's amazing how people pretending to be selling "quality" do not wish to pay a few euros to get a good translation! ...on the other side... there's nothing like a "good" translation to make me laugh!!! ... "screamed milk" is just fab!!!

Uncle!

Plus translating for the web is nothing like other types of translation. You need localization.

Gloria, pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by localization? Thanks.

David
Gloria will correct me if she means something different, but for me this refers to the fact that web pages can be read by ANYONE ANYWHERE, and that with world languages there are what might be called local versions (this is certainly true with English and Spanish).
So you need a Jamaican-English version, an English-English version etc. of your web pages.

That sounds right, Vasco. Thanks.

Reminds me a huge=EXPENSIVE ad in FCO for a car financing company in english--close but not quite right. For a couple of thousand dollars I could put it right for them.

That's exactly what it is, but it is also a matter of what keyphrases people look for in different countries. You do not want to translate in most cases but to recreate.
I have written an article about it (boring and academic), but if you are interested it's here, soon to be published:
“The translation of tourism-related websites and localization: problems and perspectives."

Thanks for the link, Gloria and congrats on getting it published!

Thanks David!