Using Interactive Translation in ESI Professional – Part VIII – Final Comments
If you stop and think about what you accomplished with last week’s exercise it might take you some time to realize what actually took place.
You were able to translate an English sentence into Spanish perfectly well without even knowing the target language at all!
This is no small feat. You actually stepped over a forbidden barrier here, you crossed a door to a new dimension in the field of translation!
Translate into an unknown language? This was an impossibility, a total nonsense a few years ago. Now, with computers and friendly software applications such as ESI Professional, this is rapidly becoming a reality.
True, it is easier to translate if you know the target language. But if you happen to be in a position where you have no knowledge of it at all, then, with a little effort and some ingenuity, you can actually accomplish even this “impossible feat.”
This is our tip to all monolingual Users: try selecting first all the difficult words, especially verbs and nouns. Read all optional meanings to see if some other meaning matches your original sentence in a better way. Pay special attention when the sentence has long chains of nouns. In these cases, there is a higher probability of a bad selection, which you could easily detect if you just click over each one of the nouns or verbs to check its proper part of speech.
At the beginning it may seem a burdensome task, but you will quickly get the hang of it. Soon it will become an intuitive ability and it will even help you learn the other language.
We are aware that ESI’s Interpretation Mode is still quite rudimentary. It was our first attempt in a field where nobody else has anything even remotely similar.
Our future versions are under way, programmed to have great improvements in this particular area, especially in the paraphrasing part. These new versions will display the paraphrased interpretation using words that depict the meaning in a more explicit way, so that you will not have to click on each word to see its selected meaning. The meaning will be evident at the first reading, particularly if it was wrongly selected.
For the time being, you will find nothing else in the market that allows you to translate this well interactively if you are a monolingual user. Actually, you will find nothing else in the market that allows you to translate interactively, period. ESI Professional is alone in the entire industry in this functionality. This is not bragging…this is just the plain, undisputed truth. |