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Many well-informed people are surprised to discover, given the profusion of electronic dictionaries and phrase books, and the inexorable nature of digital advance generally, that machine translation software for the type of texts handled by Lingua Medica is still in its infancy. A very rough idea can be gained by clicking on the ‘Translate’ option in a web browser. The result is a text which for information purposes can be useful to someone unfamiliar with the source language, especially if it deals with a field in which they have specialist knowledge. But it is far from having walk-away functionality. It cannot be put to use, e.g. published in a journal or under the company imprint, without detailed input from someone with linguistic skills and, often, knowledge of the subject matter. In practice, despite the seconds taken to produce the translation and the outlay of only $500 for better-performing software, it remains faster, simpler and cheaper to use human translators for such documents. Where translation and document management software does prove useful is with the growing profusion of highly repetitive material, e.g. the updating of standard operating procedures and product monographs. In such cases, a translation software program soon becomes driven by a huge and ever-accumulating customized database of words, strings and paragraphs which are called up automatically as the user progresses through the text. The software functions like an interactive and highly sophisticated version of Word features such as Compare Documents, Search etc. Lingua Medica uses Trados software with client-specific databases for such projects and is happy to advise clients on its suitability for their particular requirements: in some cases it can represent significant savings in time and money. |