Solutions to WTF Moments (Wild Translation Feedback)

Presenters: Donald Ford (Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian-University of Iowa College of Law / donald-ford@uiowa.edu) Matthew Gran (Part-time Reference Librarian-John Marshall School of Law / mgran@jmls.edu) 

Perhaps you've used a machine translation (“MT”) program like Google Translate or Babel Fish to translate a legal text. Some outputs were good (i.e., close enough) translations that accurately depicted the meaning of the input text. Other times, the outputs were downright strange: garbled text that made no sense. You might even have had good and bad results for the same input, resulting in a WTF moment (“Wild Translation Feedback”)—consequently making it easy to vow to never use MT programs again. However, MT and other Computer Assisted Translation (“CAT ”) systems continue to improve—but their deft use is critical.

This session will to explain WTF by: presenting a history of MT and CAT programs; providing a methodology for using CAT programs; and, demonstrating free CAT programs that can help foreign and international law users meet their translation needs (e.g., Linguee.com, IATE.europa.edu).