Where To Get A Translation: English To Russian
There are a number of different ways that you can go about translating English to Russian and which one is best suited to you is going to depend entirely on your situation and resources. For instance, if you want to set up a meeting time and place or pass on some simple information to a Russian speaker, then you will be able to use a different resource than, if you have a book or journal you are seeking to publish to the Russian market. In other words – your purpose will define your means of translation.
When you are thinking about where to get a translation from English to Russian, there are three basic possibilities. The first is to use any of the websites that offer machine translation online. Alternatively, you can get software to use offline that provides quality machine translation, including software to run on your own computer or specially designed hand held translation devices. Finally, and for the best quality translation you can get a human translation, either as a direct interpreter for speech or to work on a manuscript. Each method has advantages and disadvantages.
Using an online website has become much easier in recent years, and there are now a number of places that will offer a machine translation from English text to Cyrillic (Russian). This was previously the exclusive domain of Babelfish (a website named after the special fish invented in the Douglas Adams novel, Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, which allowed anyone to understand any language they heard), a website now run by AltaVista. More recently a number of sites have begun offering this service, amongst the best of which is not surprisingly Internet Giant Google. The main advantage of machine translation is that it is instant and (usually) free. The main disadvantage is that it is mostly a direct word for word swap which ignores grammar and context. For simple translations this is fine, but for more advanced concepts the meaning of a passage is very quickly lost. Google has tried to combat this through pure brute force, feeding its translation device billions and billions of pages of text in all languages to try and teach it grammar. The result is reasonably impressive but still nowhere near the quality of a human translation. Simple typing a few sentences into an online translator and translating to Russian and then back to English will show you how much variation there is in a machine translation.
Offline translation software and devices suffer from basically the same disadvantages without having the ‘free’ advantage thrown in. They do have their place, of course, and this is usually in a situation where people are meeting face to face and trying to communicate. The recent idea of traveling to Russia to find a bride, for instance, has been made much easier by the ability to buy a cheapish hand held translator for $150-$500.
The disadvantage of a human translation is obviously that humans don’t run on autopilot and so need payment. However, if you want to present a professional face then you simply cannot trust anything short of a human translation. When heads of state meet and do not share a mutual language, no-one would dream of attempting to let them talk through a computer – a human interpreter is used. They results of such talks are simply too important to entrust to a machine, which cannot understand context and convention in speech. In translating text the same level of trust needs to be established, because a misunderstanding in a translation cannot be explained away – it is recorded for ever.
So, the method you use is going to depend on exactly how exact you want your translation to be. Where superficial understanding is acceptable, a machine translation – either online or offline – will suffice, but where you require a high quality translation you can contact us to do the translation English to Russian for you.
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September 14th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Where To Get A Translation: English To Russian…
The main advantage of human translation is that it is of high quality. A machine translation is reasonably impressive but still nowhere near the quality of a human translation….