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Post by 🍅™️ on May 15, 2020 9:36:51 GMT 9
Hello hulemdos
it's me
your hulemdo Tomato
I think I've mentioned a couple times about hoping to get some non-machine translated sources of English on my city's website, so I wanted to ask those, who have any power to actually translate parts of their CO's websites, how that works for you? Also, if your placement has a seperate English site (looking at you thelatter ), please tell me about that too!
Can you all tell me:
1. Do you have properly translated English directly connected to your webpage, or do you have a seperate English Webpage? 2. If you know when/how you started with a properly translated site. 3. Who has the power to update English on the site. (Like can you directly edit the site, or do you have to contact IT or something) 4. If you use some sort of program for the English? (I think 83tsu was saying there's some sort of translation override program for her city's site?)
Tysm <3 <3 (I'm hoping to start this so I have some consistant work)
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Post by Psychic Pug on May 15, 2020 10:17:51 GMT 9
Hello hulemdos
it's me
your hulemdo Tomato
I think I've mentioned a couple times about hoping to get some non-machine translated sources of English on my city's website, so I wanted to ask those, who have any power to actually translate parts of their CO's websites, how that works for you? Also, if your placement has a seperate English site (looking at you thelatter ), please tell me about that too!
Can you all tell me:
1. Do you have properly translated English directly connected to your webpage, or do you have a seperate English Webpage? 2. If you know when/how you started with a properly translated site. 3. Who has the power to update English on the site. (Like can you directly edit the site, or do you have to contact IT or something) 4. If you use some sort of program for the English? (I think 83tsu was saying there's some sort of translation override program for her city's site?)
Tysm <3 <3 (I'm hoping to start this so I have some consistant work)
I typed something up but then I realised much of what I written is probably not what you wanted to read in terms of numbers 2,3 and 4 but GOSAMKO MADE we have a completely separate site that's also multilingual. |
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Post by Dee on May 15, 2020 10:26:08 GMT 9
This is my geopark's English website. It was already mostly translated when I arrived, but since then I have been asked to provide translations for updates and any page revisions. I do not have direct access, so I just give them a word doc with the translations so they can copy and paste. |
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Post by 83tsu on May 15, 2020 10:30:32 GMT 9
Yay!! It's my time to shine! (Edit: Website here for anyone who cares to look) 1. What we use:
Our City Website has a (contract?) with this company, WEB-Transer, I believe. So, our English website is not a separate English website but is a translated version of the Japanese website (with wildly varying degrees of success). We are contracted to offer English, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Korean, and Portuguese. (I only work on the English, unfortunately as I don't know any other useful languages ^^") 2. How long we've had this:
We've been using this service since 2012, I believe, though I know our website got a heavy upgrade in 2015/2016. I'm not sure what the system was like before that. (I'm going to switch up the order of questions of 3 & 4 for ease of understanding) 4. How the translations work:
So, from what I understand of how the translation service works, it has a dictionary that it pulls from in order to do the translations. However, this of course would not include 地名 outside of major cities, which can lead to highly comedic results. (One of my favorite examples is for the「植木」(Ueki), which is the name of a district in our city. One day, there was a lot of rain, so the emergency information read that "There was flooding in the potted plant.") Now, using an online website/web-tool, we can manually enter words and phrases into a 訳語 dictionary to override the machine's automatic dictionary. However, this is obviously time-consuming, and even after entering the words, for whatever reason, the machine translation doesn't recognize from time to time that it should use those instead (I'm currently researching ways around this/ways to fix this). Another function available is to look at the page in its entirety and insert your own translations sentence-by-sentence or paragraph-by-paragraph. This works pretty well, but the problem is that the formatting gets thrown off quite a bit. Example: If the words 新型コロナウイルス感染症 were in big red letters, if I fix the English translation from "new model coronavirus infectious disease" to "COVID-19," "COVID-19" might turn big and red, or it might be some other random letters in the sentence. (I think at this point, it relies on character count rather than translation words to know where to adjust font formatting). This leads to some very, uh... interesting-looking pages. (But at least the English is understandable) HOWEVER, there are additional issues if the formatting on the Japanese version of the website is strange for one reason or another. Sometimes the Transer web tool won't let me select the text to change it, or sometimes it only lets me select one character. I've bypassed this by manually entering entire sentences into the dictionary, but it's a guaranteed fix. Biggest issue: since I am often adding translations by sentences into the dictionary, if someone on the Japanese website changes even one character of that sentence, the web service will no longer match it to the one I've entered into the user dictionary and will replace it with its own attempt at translation.
3. Who manages it:
Finally! Sooooooooo before 人事異動 in April, I previously had to submit my changes to my old soup, who would then go onto the Transer website, use the web tool and change the translations based off of what I gave her. I hated doing this because it's time consuming, and my old soup always had a ton on her plate, so I didn't like giving her extra, usually unnecessary work. I once asked her if it would be possible just to do them myself, and she was like "nah, nah. You can't." Enter April and the new soup. I start doing corona translations of my own accord and send them to him. Turns out he is... less than the most technologically literate. I come in the next day, and he was like, "Hey, I was barely able to enter any of these and it takes a long time. I would be 安心 if you could do them instead. Would you mind?" And he hands me the manual for the website with the login info. -cue cartoon slot machines in my eyes hitting cherries-[soup] Would I mind?!?!? [/soup] So... I think technically I'm not supposed to be allowed to do these on my own... but now I am
Pros: As it is not a separate website, I can edit freely myself (-cough cough-) Cons: See above. Lots of formatting issues, and if I want to make sure the English is correct, I have to constantly check to see if someone changed the Japanese even a fraction, or the whole translation gets thrown off. Overall, I am not impressed by our city's autotranslate service. I honestly think Google Translate would be better in a lot of circumstances. The machine translation has trouble recognizing keigo all the time, so 本市 becomes "Motoichi," 方 gets left as-is in kanji (in the English text). I would say that about 30% of the time, it will give a translation that is mildly intelligible if you re-read it about 10 times. The other 70% of the time, it's incredibly close to pure nonsense (with the occasional kanji thrown in) |
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sacchan
So jozu at chopsticks
Why?
Posts: 134
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Post by sacchan on May 15, 2020 11:29:39 GMT 9
1. What we use:
Same as 83tsu
2. How long we've had this:
Mhh, I'm not sure.
4. How the translations work:
Same as 83tsu. Also if anyone ever finds a way around the system not recognizing words, I would love to know how you managed that.
3. Who manages it:
At the start, I had to contact IT every time. They got tired of me pretty quickly so I just update it on my own now.
Text in images of course does not get picked up by the machine translation. If I want to have the text in the images translated or add an attachment in a language other than Japanese (attachments do not get translated either) or anything of that sort, I need to contact IT and the office in charge of the original page which is...not ideal.
As 83tsu mentioned, the software deals incredibly bad with proper nouns, ending in comical results oftentimes.
Before they did not, but recently the results started showing up on google searches so that has gotten better.
Also, it seems that all changes applied to individual dictionaries are not reflected on the company's overall system.
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Post by Psychic Pug on May 15, 2020 11:34:21 GMT 9
Hello hulemdos
it's me
your hulemdo Tomato
I think I've mentioned a couple times about hoping to get some non-machine translated sources of English on my city's website, so I wanted to ask those, who have any power to actually translate parts of their CO's websites, how that works for you? Also, if your placement has a seperate English site (looking at you thelatter ), please tell me about that too!
Can you all tell me:
1. Do you have properly translated English directly connected to your webpage, or do you have a seperate English Webpage? 2. If you know when/how you started with a properly translated site. 3. Who has the power to update English on the site. (Like can you directly edit the site, or do you have to contact IT or something) 4. If you use some sort of program for the English? (I think 83tsu was saying there's some sort of translation override program for her city's site?)
Tysm <3 <3 (I'm hoping to start this so I have some consistant work)
I typed something up but then I realised much of what I written is probably not what you wanted to read in terms of numbers 2,3 and 4 but GOSAMKO MADE we have a completely separate site that's also multilingual. Shit I forgot I had two offices hehe
For gogo no office: 2. I dunno how I can help you with this since having a multilingual site is most likely an initiative from the city itself considering that we've had a looooong history of employing cirs as well as accepting immigrants (gogo no office has been around for at least 30+ years). My answer for number 2 is the same for the city hall website that I linked a while ago.
3 and 4. I have the power to update it h u e. In fact it was my main job there! I can't remember the editor we used but we used the same site to edit the Japanese and English. Although one time they did a huge overhaul of the website and they hired a gyosha for that BUT the cirs still had to do translations/translation check.
On the other hand, for the city hall site, while we don't have a say in the techy side of things the cirs have power when it comes to translation e.g. complaining about shitty deadlines, asking for more information, complaining about how our translation from last year was not updated, translating parts of the website even though they weren't requested but because they're shitty and they're on the same page as the one they originally requested might as well do it and then explain to them what you did.
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Post by 🎄🌰🌰Yoosting on an open 🔥🎄 on May 15, 2020 13:46:56 GMT 9
Up until my city's big website overhaul last year, we used Kodensha's J-Server translation software which is pretty ubiquitous for Japanese local government websites. The translation quality was atrocious, but it was at least editable. Our city's PR dept. which runs the website gave my dept. permission to edit the auto-translations, but it was usually so bad that you would end up rewriting everything, which was not what the software was designed for. When we switched to a new website, we started using Google, but the officially unsupported, non-editable, lousy one. You can 'suggest' improvements through the in-browser function, but it takes a long time to incorporate changes if it does so at all. It's kind of funny how our multilingual portal came to be. Because we did have a lot of pre-translated material such as tourism guidebooks, the bus guide, maps, newsletters etc., but it was generally impossible to navigate to them without Japanese ability, we decided to set up a portal page. Our previous translation service had a portal page where you could select your language, but it was a page on our website. I proposed that we would turn that page into an overall-multilingual info page. The idea was approved, and my office got direct editing permission for the page and all its subpages. This is especially great, because usually editing a page requires you to submit it for 'review' (in other words, a click from the PR dept which may take anywhere between 2 minutes and 8 hours), and now we can make changes and have it up within a minute. Even after the website renewal, we kept the page and now we also use it to host subpages in English and YASASHII NIHONGO about COVID-19, and the typhoon last year. |
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Post by 83tsu on Jun 1, 2020 14:37:15 GMT 9
Not sure if this belongs in this thread or the broadcasting thread (it's aimed more at people living here than tourists), but I wanted to get people's feedback on the design for our city's new multilingual FB page's profile pic and cover photo (please be honest, even if the truth is that it's DASAI) PC Version Mobile Version I humbly request your feedback! (It's not open to the public, yet) |
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Post by Dee on Jun 1, 2020 14:42:25 GMT 9
83tsuIt looks very businessy and "official." I like the colorful logo. I do think the white lettering in the picture doesn't really stand out much.
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Post by Aya Raincoat on Jun 1, 2020 14:42:34 GMT 9
83tsu I think it's perfectly fine, if kind of boring looking I agree that the lettering is a bit indistinct, especially the one in the clouds
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Post by 83tsu on Jun 1, 2020 14:54:03 GMT 9
Dee Aya Raincoat You guys are right on both points. I'll see what I can do about the cover photo, then see if I can get it KAIRAN'd and HANKO'd. (I was honestly worried that the logo might get nixed by my uppers for being too "colorful"/"exciting" haha)
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