Machine translation

In general terms, machine translation (MT) can have significantly variable results in terms of quality. In part, this depends on the degree of divergence between source and target languages, and it means that you will always have to revise your final text thoroughly. But because of their quality and the fact that they offer of a variety of languages with which to pair Catalan, the Language Services does recommend UB users two MT platforms: Apertium and Google Translate.

Of course in some cases, the final text you want may not be a perfect translation but just something that gives you a fair idea of the original. To this end, the quality of most MT first drafts is usually enough. However, in such cases it makes sense to attach a note to the text explaining that it is simply for information or reference purposes and is not in any way prepared for publication. And you can paste your MT draft in a template which specifies that the text itself is machine-translated and has not been corrected.

Because these translation platforms are independent from the UB, the Language Services does not participate at any moment in the translation process itself; however, we have provided users with a series of guidelines on how to get the most out of these tools.

Apertium

Apertium is a free and open source machine translation platform which pairs Catalan with Aranese, English, Occitan, Portuguese and Spanish, and supports a series of other languages and language pairs. Developed by the Transducens Research Group of the Department of Software and Computing Systems at the University of Alicante, its initial design was largely based upon MT systems such as Internostrum and Universia. Apertium can translate texts and webpages, and upload and translate .txt, .html, .rtf and .odt files.

Fast guide to Apertium (in Catalan).

Google Translate

Google Translate is a free statistically-based machine translation service provided by Google Inc. offering more than thirty different languages including Basque, Catalan and Galician, and featuring English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. The program translates documents in practically all the standard formats, including PDF, and is integrated into the standard Google Chrome browser for automatic webpage translation. Users are also asked for alternative translations, so that these can be used for future updates to improve the translation process.

Fast guide to Google Translate (in Catalan).

Fast guide to Google Translator Toolkit (in Catalan).