Support for Indie Authors discussion

Hi

I am planning to translate my novel to German. I was wondering if there were any really good artificial intelligence programs out there to translate it. My next step would be to hire an editor to proof read and check it.

Any suggestions/recommendations on good professional translation software.

Thanks in advance

Luke Gracias

Have you tried the translation option in Wow? It seems work well for letters and Xmas cards.

Hopefully you have someone in mind that reads German and can fix the mistakes from the translation program. The best way to have it translated is by having a real person do the translation then an editor in that language to copy edit it, making the corrections for you. From what I've heard (I don't use them) there are several programs for translations to various languages but they do create errors because English has so many variations of words, the AI translators have errrors.

I am English, with an Honours degree and Civil Service interpretership in German, and lived in Germany for 16 years. I am also the author of 36 novels, so if you would like my help....

Peter wrote: "Have you tried the translation option in Wow? It seems work well for letters and Xmas cards."

Should be Word not wow! Sorry.
I have an acquaintance who teaches German. If you are interested I can arrange an digital introduction.

I speak fluently 5 languages, and worked for 47 years as a freelance translator, so here's my input:

1. Word is LOUSY translating and requires an extensive review. In particular, it is very bad translating the gender. For example, it changes the feminine gender into masculine for no clear reason. It also has serious problems with implicit gender. Thus "Asiento." in Spanish is translated as "Seat." instead of the correct "I nod." It confuses a sentence with a word, even if it makes no sense.

2. IA is slightly better, but not by much. Dialogues in particular seem to be particularly affected by punctuation and gender errors. The translations into French (which I admit has a quite peculiar dialogue punctuation) are outright scary in some cases.

I have seen quite a few AI-translated published books by now, and I certainly won't give them good marks when I spot those. Now, you pay for an editor for you original manuscript and don't want to spend a dime for the translation? Even if you use AI for that, that's not much better than writing the book using AI.

Amazon asks for a reason whether you've used AI for your writing or translation. It's not forbidden, but I suspect that it puts your book on the "suspect" list.

My advice: If you translate your book, use a human translator, or at the very least let somebody native to the language of the translated book have a nice hard editorial look at it! Why should your translation have LESS quality than your original?