Hello all.
I am running a small experiment - mostly humorous, but should have interesting results nonetheless - comparing an automatic translation relay (e.g. http://www.conveythis.com/translation.php) to an equivalent one done by actual professional human translators.
This will be published - most likely in the Annals of Improbable Research, SpecGram, or the like - and all resulting data put online.
Since it involves a bunch of individual translations in a lot of different languages, and the material needs to be kept secret until the end of the experiment (to prevent tipping off later translators), I'm doing this by email rather than a standard translation request on forum.
If you're interested in participating and have done professional translation, please email conlangs@saizai.com giving:
1. a list of the directional translations* you do (e.g. "English -> French, Spanish, Klingon; Spanish -> Arabic; French -> English"
2. (optional) a single sharable link to your credentials as a pro translator (so you can get due credit, and the writeup can accurately claim to be doing a reasonable comparison of pro vs auto translation)
I'll figure out what chain we can do and email you the text from the preceding link. Ideally I'd like to see it go through at least 10 languages so there's enough mutation in both to be amusing & interesting.
Thanks,
- Sai Emrys
http://saizai.com
http://conlang.org
* If it's not between English and one of the languages in the following list (from Google Translate), please also give a link to a bidirectional autotranslator for the language.
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, IrishItalian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish
Sounds like a fun experiment! I'm not a professional translator, so I can't help... but it would be interesting to see the result.