Translation systems can provide the gist of the original text, however, I wouldn't recommend trying to carry out business communication or pen pal exchanges using them.
Translation systems can provide the gist of the original text, but still do not provide a natural, complete translation. So, I wouldn't recommend trying to carry out business communication or pen pal exchanges using them. The free options for English/Chinese translation software are also very limited. In most situations, you still need a human.
One page that lists several different translation systems is Chinese Software Digest. Another page in Chinese is at China Computerworld. Other possibilities are EV Dict, Alexander Chinese to English Software, RoboWord English-Chinese Software, TransPerfect, or Systran, but I haven't tried them myself.
If you want a portable translator, try the Besta Handheld Translator.
An on-line English/Chinese automatic translation I know of is the IBM English/Chinese translation engine, where all the instructions are in English. AltaVista's Babelfish also now supports translation to and from Chinese from English. Another possibility is the on-line Gist-in-Time System, which is incorporated into Netscape 6.
English/Chinese MT Software
- CITAC
- Dr. Eye
- TransWhiz
- Systran Profession Premium
- Translation.net: One place to buy above programs
English to Chinese MT Web Services
Chinese to English MT Web Services
Links of Interest
- Taipei Times Article on Chinese to English MT Companies
- Otek's Chinese/English-English/Chinese Translation System
- CITAC Machine Translation System
- Good summary of Issues in Chinese to English MT
- Chinese to English Translation of Interrogatives
- Paper on Systran's Chinese/English MT Efforts
- BehaviorTran English/Chinese MT System
- Silc Research Center
- THCEMT Chinese-English Machine Translation
- Article on Machine Translation (in GB-encoded Chinese)
- The Chinese Information Processing Open Laboratory (CIPOL;
Beijing) of CCID, Ministry of Electronics Industry (MEI), is
interested in technical cooperation with foreign corporations via the
Internet. CIPOL has developed commercially usable Chinese language
software products, including Huanyu Tong Chinese-English machine
translation, bidirectional dictionaries, text correction, and Chinese
full-text information retrieval. Intelligent text classification is
in development, and other projects can be considered. CIPOL is also
interested in providing human translators for technical manuals, and
also data entry in Chinese or English.
[Y.Q.
From The Computists Communique