How to prepare a text for machine translation?

Although humans excel at understanding context, nuances and identifying errors, machines often struggle with these tasks. When preparing a text for machine translation, it's very important to follow certain steps. Here are some helpful tips:

 

  • Avoid errors

Make sure that your text doesn't have any mistyping errors. Words with typos can be mistranslated.

“Wesołych Świąt spędzonych w rodzinnym grobie” (Merry Christmas spent in your family grave) has a totally different meaning than „Wesołych świąt spędzonych w rodzinnym gronie” (Merry Christmas spent with your family). Changing one letter in a word can make a significant difference.

 

  • Check the punctuation

Check the punctuation because modern machine translators rely on dots and commas to guess the meaning.

As you can see, the comma completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

 

  • Don't use a machine translator as a dictionary

Remember that machine translators can be wrong when working with single words that have multiple meanings. For example, the word “zamek” in Polish can refer to either a castle or a zipper.

 

  • Provide context

Provide context in your texts because it helps machine translators to generate more accurate results. Look at the example below:

The second point was translated incorrectly as "shoes made in Poland" because of lack of proper context. If you provide more information, you receive the correct translation:

 

  • Select the source language

Make sure that you indicate the language of the source text because language detection algorithms may be wrong. For example:

Google Translate automatically detected Polish and translated the words incorrectly

After selecting the language manually, you receive the correct output.

 

  • Choose simplicity

Try to minimize the use of “special cases” such as: idioms and slang words. They aren't understood by machine translators.

 

  • Idioms

The sentence completely lost its meaning because of the poorly translated idiom.

Tip: Verify idioms in a dictionary if you have doubts.

 

  • Slang words

"La vache" in French slang means "oh, my god!" which is an expression used to show positive surprise. If the word is literally translated as "cow", the sentence takes on an offensive tone.

Tip: Replace slang expressions with more formal words to avoid incorrect meanings.

 

  • Avoid long sentences

Avoid complex sentences to make your text easier to understand.

The text comes from the French version of "The Oval Portrait" written by Edgar Allan Poe. The sentence is very long and the output - unsatisfactory.

After dividing the text into several shorter sentences or paragraphs, the accuracy and consistency of the output increased.