Well I would like to translate some documents from English to Spanish and I have done some trials on Google translate...however I don't know Spanish and therefore can't verify if the documents have been translated correctly...
What would be a way to verify this or alternatively what free service or tool could I use to translate from English to Spanish trusting that it would be done correctly with no errors?
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You can be 100% sure that a machine translation will contain errors. There is not even a shadow of a doubt about that. As a pro translator, I have more than my fair share of experience with the various systems (systrans, reverso, google translate) and I can guarantee you that I have never seen one of them produce an acceptable translation. The best one, by far, is Google translate. On some subjects, it comes close to a decent translation, but it can make very, very serious mistakes. (like miss a double negative and translate the opposite - pretty common). I have tried numerous times to "pretranslate" with machine translation, and to "edit" the output. So far, it's been a waste of time. There is something wrong with just about every sentence, and fixing it is slower than just translating from scratch. Bottom line is, right now, if you need reliable translations, get a human translator. ============= edit: About passing the result of the translation through machine translation again as a quality check measure. This doesn't work. Statistical machine translation (Google and others) works by maintaining huge databases of texts which are thought to be translations one of another and by figuring out statistically what translations are most likely right given the original context. These are then assembled following the general rules of the target language. The meaning of the words and sentences plays no part in the decision, it's just a matter of which words were used most often in combination with other words. Now, when you backtranslate (translate the translation back into the source language), the process starts again, querying those same databases. As such, the resulting backtranslation is not in any way indicative of the quality of the translation. You can easily have false positives or false negatives. At present, machine translation is useful when you want to have a general idea of the meaning of a document, and it works great when you know the context and what to expect. But using machine translation for something important is asking for trouble. | |||||||||
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The only real way to verify is to ask a native speaker to look at it and give you his opinion. This is not something can be solved by software. As far as trusting, I think Google Translate really is the best you can get. At least the best you can get for free. | |||
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You can try posting a job on mechanical turk. It's an amazon service that emulates AI. https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome | |||||
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