Thursday, June 5, 2008
Any Hebrew-English translators out there?
The other day I discovered that my latest mystery, Cache of Corpses, had been reviewed on a Hebrew web site, shvoong.com.
There doesn't seem to be a Babelfish-style Hebrew-to-English translation engine on the Web. Plenty of human translators abound on the Internet, but the least expensive one I found wants $120 to render 300 words of Hebrew into English. That's a bit dear for me.
So: Can any reader of this blog tell me what the review says, or at least its gist?
Not that it's a rave. A summary line gives the novel only two out of five stars.
Speaking of Internet translation engines, Finnish to English seems to be problematical, too, as this Finnish cultural website suggests.
The subject of that story, the "Mobile Female Monument," is, well, singular. It's doubtful that it would be received enthusiastically in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Sorry, can't help with the Hebrew stuff - but I can understand why Babelfish might have problems getting anything beyond a garbled translation of Finnish. Hmmm, my concept of Finnish culture was something more like "viiliä" or "piimää".
ReplyDeleteViilia I know, but piimaa? OK, I'll bite, what's piimaa?
ReplyDeletePiimä is a kind of cultured buttermilk, similar in flavor to villi but more free flowing and less viscoelastic.
ReplyDeleteHi! Well, it is just a summary of the book's content. The writer does not express his or her own opinion of the book
ReplyDeleteBy the way, Shvoong has a forum where you can ask people to translate summaries for you (as the site is in fact in 34 languages!)
See: http://community.shvoong.com/en/?fid=34
Henry,
ReplyDeleteI am a Hebrew to English translator who works for a whole lot less than your lowest price quotation (my prices are more around $25 per 250 words) so I would be happy to contact you directly if you are still interested. P.S I wish I could charge those rates!
David Rose
Thank you, Mr. Rose. Now that I know the passage in question is simply a plot summary, there's no point in translating it now. But I have your picture on the piano for the next time I need something translated from Hebrew.
ReplyDeleteBabylon.com shareware seems to work ok. The software is no where as good as human translations but it gives the basic idea for the most part. I've also heard of a program called dagesh pro that translates both websites as well as full text files. It should be on tes.com. Babylon has a free trial though so it's the only one I've tried.
ReplyDeleteHi Henry,
ReplyDeleteLike Mr. Rose, I too wish I could charge such rates!
You might be somewhat comforted to know that the "two out of five" rating is actually a ranking of the summary, not of your book :)
65 visitors have reached the summary, and only one has ranked it.
Cheers
Erik
Erikland Translation
using Google Chrome has a built in translator. When you load the page in Google Chrome a translator bar will appear at top giving option to translate.
ReplyDeleteCheck out here: https://www.quicklytranslate.com/
ReplyDelete