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