Details of the Translation Process

The Pima County Elections website is being translated through "machine translation" which means that it is translated dynamically (on-the-fly) through a third party service.

Benefits:

• This method allows for translation of the entire website which would otherwise be impossible due to limited resources. It does not, however, allow for the translation of PDF files.
• Updates to content are processed when posted rather than delayed awaiting a human translation.
• Translations are handled uniformly -- rather than allowing for human interpretation -- one translator's choice may not be the same as another's. Many different dialects exist and a perfect translation is almost impossible -- this allows us to begin at the same point and improve as we can.
• We do have the ability to create supplemental dictionaries -- such as proper names, mining terms, job titles and idiomatic expressions. These dictionaries are applied in addition to the ones used by the translation site.
• The software can also be told when a word or phrase should NOT be translated -- leaving it as English if that is the most appropriate solution.
  

Issues:

• Machine translation is not perfect and may create some poor translations (which can be corrected).
• We are limited in what we can affect on the entire site -- we can enter individual words or phrases -- but not entire paragraphs or pages. We can decide to translate an entire page and simply have the software ignore a page as well if necessary -- but this would require human translation and review. 

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Last modified by BryanC on October 31, 2008