The Art of Document Translation
February 9, 2014 by Dr. Letitia Wright
Filed under Front Page
Document translation goes beyond helping your children with their French homework. It has grown and adapted and now translating documents enables sharing across languages and different generations. How exactly I will come to in a moment, but for the meantime let’s focus on the sheer technology of it all. Technological advances are great it is generally agreed and along with everything else, document translation has been the beneficiary of light speed type technological advances. Gone are the days of using a dictionary and translation book, now you can have paragraphs and even pages of text deciphered at the click of a button. Of course there is no substitute for actually learning the language and becoming fluent, a skill that is still very vital technology or not. However it is nonetheless impressive how algorithms have adapted to detail any and all foreign language into your mother tongue. Such tools are of much help for my cousin. Whilst only young she often writes short stories in class, these stories are great to share with her elder Portuguese grandparents. However as their native tongue is Portuguese translating can often be a long and drawn out process with my broken knowledge. However thanks to online document translation tools I helped my cousin sit down at the computer, type out her story and then with a click of a button have it automatically translated into Portuguese. Then our old friend technology enables me to fire this off in a quick email (which the Grandparents can just about handle) for them to read and enjoy. Using document translation has also helped to improve my own second language and engage my cousin into learning more Portuguese and communicate with her grandparents. They too have taken to writing back to my cousin and I when the phone is not available. It is safe to say then that document translation has opened many more doors than would have been possible just a few years ago.