Siemens Program Documentation Translation

[Fitz]

We have a new customer who has several S7-400's with programs that are documented in German. They would like us to translate them into English. Is there any easy way to do this, or even relatively easy? Am I stuck with a word by word lookup and translation? Thanks for any insight.

 

[Peter Nachtwey]

There is no easy way.

I use Google translate text. I was using it this week to support someone in Italy. I have an Italian translator but she wasn't required most of the time.

Google translate text will work for most things but you should still get a German to English translator ( a real person ) to sanity check the results. German and English have idioms or sequences of words that don't translate well.
"What kind of a car is that" translates to "Was für ein Auto ist das?" which if you translate word for word means "What for a car is that?". That blew my away in German class and I will never forget because I missed that on a test. That is when I first became aware of idioms. There is know easy way to translate the idioms and slang. You just need to know them.

BTW, Google translate text got that right.

 

[Fitz]

Thanks Peter. We may try this instead of contracting with someone who knows German. However, it might be good to have someone available to call if we run into a technical term or idiom that doesn't convert in the software.

For fun, I translated "Dude, where's my car?" and it returned "Ey Mann, wo ist mein Auto?".

I also found Yahoo has a similar translator called babelfish.

 

[rootboy]

I also found Yahoo has a similar translator called babelfish.

Good luck with that, the fish really doesn't do well for technical translation.

I remember a translated article that kept on mentioning something about "harbors". It took me awhile, but I finally realized that it was talking about serial ports. LOL

If nothing else, it'll be funnier than all get out.


Edit: I gotta learn how to proofread...