Software/tool to compare translated document

Question

Is there any tool/software to compare two documents which have different language, let's say document A is English and document B is Thai?

It should be able to pinpoint the differences between those documents, like the paragraph number, the table position (if the documents contain any tables, graphics), bullet points, etc..

Also, is there a tool which is able to generate document statistics, more advanced than the MS Word statistics?

Besides that, is there such a tool that supports many file formats, too, not only word/plain text documents, but also excel, pdf?

Any idea? Thank you. :)

Answer 1

No. The problem is one of context - you, as a human, understand context; whereas a computer only knows the binary stuff behind the scenes. Finding a way to make a computer understand context is one of the hard problems in computing -- and it might even be the Holy Grail.

For example, you know just by looking that one document is written in Thai and the other is written in English. The computer only sees the bits and bytes of the various letter encodings. So, if you tell the computer to compare the document, it will compare byte 1 with byte 1 and byte 2 with byte 2, regardless of what language you see.

The only way I could see comparing exactly what you're asking is by stripping out the text somehow and just comparing the formatting. No clue how you would go about doing that though.

Answer 2

The translation software will have to note down the line numbers, word numbers, etc. Maybe you can suggest this as a feature to Google Translate.