What's good Chinese-English translation software?

I’d like to know from people who actually bought some for use. How much was it? How accurate? Was it able to recognise everything you threw at it?What are the pros and cons?

I’m playing with the free Systran translation feature on their website and it seems pretty good but am not sure if I should buy their software, or perhaps try someone else instead.

“Playing with” it is about all you’ll be able to do with it. But go ahead and have fun. When you need a real translation into English, you can call any of a number of actual human translators. Just don’t ask us to edit the tripe that comes out of translation software systems. :laughing:

You can try Dr. Eye, which lets you hold the mouse’s cursor over a section of Chinese, displaying an explanation of the character in English, including pronunciation, while your keyboard entry cursor remains elsewhere on the page so you can type the English. Very convenient. But like all translation software I’ve seen, you still have to use your brain, and just treat it as suggestions rather than as actual translation.

[quote]Just don’t ask us to edit the tripe that comes out of translation software systems.
[/quote]

[color=red]AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!![/color]

And don’t be surprised when the editor contacts you to inform you that having it completely re-translated will cost you about half the cost of attempting to edit (guess the meaning of) the claptrap that comes out of translation software.
One of my clients just spent actual US$ (quite a few of them, too) on some kind of “translation” software. She sent me the results last week and was somewhat pissed to discover that while the software did in fact provide her with pieces of paper (MANY pieces of paper :fume: ) covered in English words (printed in very nice straight lines, I’ll admit), they were not in any kind of conventional order and certainly did not represent a translation, even in the loosest possible sense of the word.
Save your money.

(I seem to be having a parentheses day – how gauche!)

I don’t believe there is any half-decent Chinese->English translation software, the problem is that Chinese doesn’t really have any definate grammar, and a lot of things depend on context, which software can’t understand yet. English->Chinese is a little easier because English tends to use different words for different meanings.

Personally, I’ve found the best translation software to be a copy of Word and an electronic dictionary - of course, I rely quite heavily on a specific peripheral too. It interfaces with the computer via the keyboard, and has it’s main processing unit somewhere between my ears (precise location yet to be verified). :stuck_out_tongue:

I was afraid of that. I’ve seen results from what purports to be translation software - the English didn’t make sense at all.

I would like at least an e-dictionary though, it beats searching out the Chinese characters in a paper dictionary.

Dr Eye is reasonably affordable. Does it do well with technical terms? scientific terms?