| Loose Grammar
This week’s tip concentrates on ESI’s ability
to interpret ‘Loose Grammar’. An incorrectly
written sentence or a “loose construction”
will almost always throw off ESI, rendering your translation
less than perfect and often incorrect.
ESI is thrown off balance when a hyphen or comma or quotation
mark that should be present within the structure of a sentence
is not included. Also, if a sentence is continued at the end
of a period without at least one space between the period
and the following word, the ESI is also confused by this problem.
These common errors create a great deal of problems for the
ESI for one simple reason: rules. ESI is
based on a grammatical set of rules which allow a quality
translation when followed. If we were to open the gates on
these rules somewhat, several other problems would arise.
Take a look at the sentence “Good morning, teacher.”
The translation for this sentence is correctly given as
“Buenos días, maestro.” However, very
often people forget to add the comma in a sentence such as
this. If you typed in the sentence “Good morning
teacher” without the comma, the translation you
receive is “Buen maestro matutino.” Even
though one translation for the word ‘morning’
is ‘matutino’, this would obviously
not be the correct way to go about translating this sentence,
as ‘morning’ is not being used as an
adjective here. The problem is, if we loosen the rules to
fit sentences such as this, we open the floodgates to hundreds
of potential translation errors on the most basic of sentences.
As you can see, it’s quite a dilemma we face.
It is also important to note that this problem is not exclusive
to Word Magic’s ESI. All translation software deals
with these exact same problems. We ask that you have patience
and make use of the Interactive Mode, a feature exclusive
to Word Magic’s ESI program, and all its included features
to attain the quality translation you require. Even as Word
Magic Software continues to investigate these rules and make
adjustments where possible, in most cases the solution will
simply be that the users make sure they get all those periods
and quote marks put in their proper place.
This concludes this week’s tip. Thank you for taking
the time to review this email and for your continued support
of our products and services.
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