[sword-devel] question regarding Android front end

[Caleb Maclennan]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 15:53, Martin Denham <mjdenham at gmail.com> wrote:
>... has proposed doing a translation of all languages using a Google tool
> but I don't know how well the Google tool would handle Chinese

I haven't seen the original discussion context that this comment
references, but having had some experience in the area of translated
software I wanted to make a comment about the viability of machine
translation for software interfaces:

Forget about how well it handles or doesn't handle Chinese -- for
which there is undoubtedly a large corpus of documents and hand fixed
translations to at least give it a fighting chance -- but this is a
crazy idea for many minority languages more recently introduced to the
world of machine translation. I've seen some software interfaces that
were obviously done this way and they are the subject of nothing but
ridicule even if the base software might have been a good thing.

I love Google Translate and their various language tools, but let's
put the effort into finding local translators before throwing software
out there!

Caleb