translation technology, vocabulary?

[Guest guest]

Wenlin is somewhat limited in special vocabulary, as it obviously would be, but it's character set and dictionary are very robust, and the fact that you can add things to the dictionary very easily makes it very useful for this sort of translation.

 

What I'm curious about, and wondering if anybody who is tech savvy could help with, is whether one can make a dictionary file which can be moved from PC to PC for Wenlin, or one of the other English user friendly Chinese WPs.

 

I do some translation in the manner described below, and if the Chinese isn't too wild, I get much more than a basic idea of what they are saying. I've had two years of very moderate experience with plugging away with books and occasional help from Chinese friends, which on the whole was fairly painless.

 

The scanner part sounds like the most interesting thing! The combination of that and the CD collections of medical classics would be a wonderful combination.

 

Par

 

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cha

Sunday, May 11, 2003 12:24 AM

translation technology

My colleague Bob Damone was very excited the other day to tell me about his new translation discovery. Bob is an herbalist who has been studying chinese for about 15 years. He is currently translating Jiao Shu de's volume on formulas for paradigm. He is not well known, but he is well respected by the publishing houses specializing in translation and many of the top schools.Anyway Bob was excited about his new sheet fed scanner. He said he could feed pages copied from chinese medical texts into the scanner. Then he converts the scanned images to a text file in WORD. Then he opens the file in wenlin (a chinese character software). When he places the cursor over the characters in wenlin, the program gives the definitions of the terms. According to Bob, wenlin has lots of medical terms already and it may be linked with a more extensive TCM database at some point in the future.So I assumed that what he meant was that a person such as myself could get a very rough sense of what an article was about using this method, but not much more. But Bob insisted that one could actually get extensive useful detailed practical information by doing this (if one knew basic chinese grammar, of course). I will hope to see what he means early next week when I get a demonstration. I take Bob very seriously on this matter. He is not one to overestimate the value of technology or minimize the need to deep study. Quite the contrary, actually.Perhaps I am just reporting something already well known to many of you, but I had not heard this before. It does strike me that using this methodology to access chinese language material is akin to the method Bob Flaws describes in his book on the subject. In that book, Bob suggests a method that centers around learning by doing. Basically sitting there with a dictionary and translating the characters one by one. Beginning with a basic grammar and a handful of characters one adds to vocabulary with each successive translation. This is an effective method for some people (but not for all). I believe this method of using wenlin essentially substitutes for the process of identifying the characters in a stroke order dictionary. It may thus not convey the essence of chinese medicine that some say is contained in the actual characters, but it may on the other hand provide access to considerable data not currently available to those who do not read chinese. Plus the act of using wenlin in this way will serve to educate the user in chinese each time he scans a page. Now I know full well that one would retain characters better if they are actually written and looked up the old fashioned way frequently. But if the bottom line on gaining access to chinese sources is to keep up on modern texts, recent journals and classical case literature (as opposed to reading complex treatises or classic texts), then this technology might be a great springboard towards this end. There will be a language learning exhibition at the redwing booth at the CHA conference in June. I believe we may have an opportunity to demonstrate this exact process at that time as Bob Damone plans to be at the booth.BTW, this exhibition is in the public halls which do not require an admission fee. so if you are kind of local to San diego, take a drive down even if you are not coming for the whole show. And you can always decide to walk in to the conference at the last moment. Chinese Herbshttp://www..orgvoice: fax: "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds" -- Albert Einstein