Welcome!

Welcome to the work in progress that is my blog. My current plan is to share little tidbits relating to translation and translator issues, Hebrew lit in English translation and in general, and anything else that catches my fancy and seems pertinent. This might evolve over time – stay tuned!

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One Response to Welcome!

  1. Shizuka says:

    Celina, realize that there are siiunttoas where a professional translation is impractical — and a rough translation will do OK. For example, imagine you run an online discussion forum where THOUSANDS of new message are posted by users each day. Can you imagine the daunting task, and cost, of hiring someone — or a team of people — to translate each of those new messages — into dozens of languages nonetheless ? It’s mind-boggling, really. And as that webmaster, you may realize that there are people all around the world who don’t speak/read any English, but would find the content on your forums very useful. But, alas, they don’t read English but would be quite happy to read a broken automated translation, if it was available, since it would be better than nothing. And maybe they don’t know about any of the automated translation tools that they could install into their browser — but if you offered the automated Google Translation gadget embedded on your website, they could opt to use it and read these messages posted by their fellow users, added to your forum every minute of every day. (Mind you, most of the message posted would be in quick, vernacular English — certainly not well crafted, well thought out language with long-term intent that would be better served by professional translation.)I have no doubt that automated translation technology will NEVER replace good ol’ human translations, but I think Google’s offering a great service by making it easy for webmasters to offer quick n’ dirty translations, which can help visitors in many siiunttoas, as I illustrated above.