Constantly we get requests from customers for translations of our manuals into certain languages like German, Italian, French, Spanish and others. As everybody knows, our manuals are huge in size. A translation into a new language will be a significant investment (around up to USD 20000 per language) which simply is too expensive to afford.
In these days where software is all around in our day-to-day life, people often use online translators like the Google Translator and copy these translations into their communication tools like email, WhatsApp etc. These translation tools have become better and better over time. Our experience is that the translation from English into German, Spanish, Italian, French etc. are pretty reasonable. Always, when English is the source, the translations are at least understandable and may help people.
Given the constant requests for translations of our manuals into certain languages, the idea has come up to use Google Translator for the use of our online manuals in realtime. Technically the concept would be that when the online page is called the according page is passed through the Google Translator and the translation is displayed to the user.
The language of the manual may be configurable in our software (e.g. Composer in English with online manual in Italian).
Definitely such an online translation will never be a true translation e.g. done by a native speaker. All the images will still be in English. Some phrases are simply wrong. However, such a translation may be reasonable good enough as a refernece manual. A reference manual is mostly helpful to open people's mind and to give a good hint to somebody what to do.
However, this concept only make sense if the translation by Google Translator is good enough for a reference book.
So far we received some feedback from a few customers where they believe that the Google Translator results would be good enough for this kind of use.
In order to receive a broader feedback here are a few examples in additional languages. Any feedback would be helpful. Dependant on the feedback we will move forward to add this feature into the next release 3.0.7.
I have prepared such links where the "Select Region Help" is translated into German, Spanish, Italian, French. Please see link below.
(Dependant on your browser may be the forwarding needs to be activated and/or a translate button needs to be clicked)
Simply click for the according language to
Any feedback to our idea is appreciated. Thanks.
Reinhold