Chinese Translation Technology

[Guest guest]

Hi All, & Hi Todd & Bob Felt,

 

I am cross-posting this to PA-L, PVA-L and VBMA.

 

 

> Bob Damone was very excited 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 ... well respected by publishing

> houses specializing in translation and many of the top schools. 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 (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… Bob insisted that one

> could 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.

 

 

Bob Damone and you are not the only ones to be excited. I

have been looking for something like that for several years! Please

keep us posted on your demo of the system!

 

I have had off-list discussion with Bob Felt [Paradigm Publishers]

on the possibilities of getting authoritative digital data in Chinese

and transforming it to English via existing hardware and software.

Bob explained that there were/are many technical problems to be

overcome and that current software to do the task is very

expensive.

 

I presume that Bob Felt and Bob Damone have discussed the

problems of machine translation. I would appreciate their input to

the discussion at this stage.

 

if your impressions are that the new technology gives

reasonable translations, can you post the following data to the List:

 

1. Details [including cost] of the scanner and character-recognition

software used to create the Word file.

 

2. Details [including cost] of the Wenlin software

 

3. Can Bob's system also display the Pinyin terms for the

characters?

 

4. Could one who does NOT know Chinese grammar use the

system effectively?

 

WWW has vast amounts of Chinese, Japanese and Korean data

about TCM / Herbal Medicine / acupuncture. Admittedly, most of

those pages are on commercial sites, but I reckon one can still

glean useful info from those sites.

 

Although better than nothing, Babelfish is a rather crude translator

and it will not handle very large pages. If Bob Damone's system

works for scanned Chinese text, could you ask him if it can be

used to translate WWW Pages also?

 

s he looked to see if equivalent systems could handle Japanese

and Korean also?

 

 

 

Best regards,

 

 

WORK : Teagasc Staff Development Unit, Sandymount Ave., Dublin 4, Ireland

WWW :

Email: <

Tel : 353-; [in the Republic: 0]

 

HOME : 1 Esker Lawns, Lucan, Dublin, Ireland

WWW : http://homepage.eircom.net/~progers/searchap.htm

Email: <

Tel : 353-; [in the Republic: 0]

[Guest guest]

Phil,

 

, " " <

@e...> wrote:

 

>

> if your impressions are that the new technology gives

> reasonable translations, can you post the following data to the List:

 

 

first, let me be clear. this program is a translation aid. it does not produce

intelligible translations automatically. It could eliminate the most tedious

and

time consuming part of translation for beginners, which is looking up

definitions in stroke order dictionaries. It can sometimes take me many

minutes to do this for each character.

>

> 1. Details [including cost] of the scanner and character-recognition

> software used to create the Word file.

 

scaner was 400 on sale for 120, software included. have to get back to you

on brand.

>

> 2. Details [including cost] of the Wenlin software

 

at directron.com for $169

 

>

> 3. Can Bob's system also display the Pinyin terms for the

> characters?

 

yes

 

>

> 4. Could one who does NOT know Chinese grammar use the

> system effectively?

 

No, but basic chinese grammar is not hard

 

If Bob Damone's system

> works for scanned Chinese text, could you ask him if it can be

> used to translate WWW Pages also?

 

I do not think so unless wenlin can read html. But webpages are not written in

text. But Bob Felt would know better than I.