Re: Universal Translation Language

On Sun, 30 May 1999 07:47:44 +0100, "Raymond A. Brown"
<raybrown@...> skribis:


>>I thought it was needless to say that UTL language is not intended for
>>translation of literature, artistic texts, etc.
>
>Why?
>
>What then is the not-so-universal TL language intended for.  Translating
>scientific and/or technical texts?  But such texts are not noted for =
having
>a great deal of ambiguity?
>
>What is the "UTL" intended for?
Ok, I'll try to explain it as clearly as I can.=20

A lot of books, magazines, web pages, articles and documents of any
kind are written every year. Most of them will not ever be translated
to other languages, because of human translation costs. Translation
software has been tried as a mean to reduce translator's work (and
cost), but its output is usually too erroneous to be of help.=20

However, with UTL, things can change substantially, as UTL is a
language which can be processed easily and almost error-freely by a
machine translator. As results of this, from a UTL version of any text
one will be able to obtain several MT-ed versions of it to several
languages with almost no need of human post-editing. Thus, translation
costs are normally reduced to a 5-20% (depending on number of target
languages and requirements of quality, given by post-editing).

In other words, at the cost of one single human translation NL -> UTL
one will obtain multiple translations (5, 10, 20...) UTL -> NLs.

As far as multitranslation of literature works respects, the high
requirements of quality of this kind of translations (it's not enough
that the translation be 'correct') may make human translation a better
option, but I think the UTL translation could still be useful as an
aid to the human translators, to save work.=20


Saludos,
Marcos