Product Reviews

Designed for small businesses, SYSTRAN Pro is a language translation package that lets you translate any text from English into French, German, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, and from any of the above into English. It's blindingly simple to use: just type or paste a block of text in your chosen language into the 'Source' window, then click 'Translate'. Within a couple of seconds, a translated text appears in the 'Target' window.

It's definitely worth taking a few moments to customise the program's built-in translation tools to suit your requirements. Choose the general style of your text, then decide if you want to ignore any words in the original - usually names or places - by using the 'Do not translate' option. Words the software doesn't recognise are left in the original language, but you can set a marker to highlight the 'not found' words, and SYSTRAN will save a list of them. A more time-consuming - but definitely more worthwhile - way of building accuracy into your translations is putting together your

ADVERTISEMENT

own 'customer-specific dictionary'. This enables you to add words and phrases not found in the standard SYSTRAN dictionary.

If nothing else, the speed at which SYSTRAN Pro churns out translated text is truly amazing. But after a couple of experiments, it's clear this isn't exactly a translation wonder-drug to cure linguistic impotence. A closer look at the results will leave anyone with more than a cursory understanding of the language grinding their teeth.

Don't go expecting great literature: the translated text often comes out very stilted, and there were some very simple words the software should have recognised, but didn't. Although the words 'pidgin English' spring to mind, you do get the general gist of the text - and there's no denying that the software certainly takes out most of the donkey work, especially on longer texts.

To be fair, accuracy is going to be a problem with any computer-generated translation - and it's likely to be years before a machine can generate a translation of the quality turned out by a native speaker. As translation software goes, this particular package is simple to use, professional to look at - and very fast. It will, without a doubt, save you the crippling outlay of using a translator. Then again, the price tag is very high given the amount of legwork that's needed to edit and proof the final document - for which you'll need a pretty decent understanding of both the source and the target languages anyway. Though this package is certainly not going to have you hurdling the language barrier, it could go some way to helping you get a leg over.