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Awele has adopted the MT software, Power Translator Pro^®, which Alliance 21 had been using for some years. This translation-assistance software manages translations to and from English (US spelling) for French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Italian. Version 7.0 also includes Japanese.

This software has the advantage of not being too expensive, but especially that of making it possible to update the dictionaries. Thus, in the past years, we have updated the English-French, French-English, English-Spanish, and Spanish-English dictionaries, and to a much lesser degree, the Portuguese-English dictionary, with terms and expressions that we use in the framework of our work. We have thus been able to improve its “raw” production considerably.

You should be able to find Power Translator Pro^® in any good software shop.

Install the translation program and the updated dictionaries …

It is a classic software installation. Just follow the instructions. If you don't have a lot of memory in your hard drive, select only the languages that you need.

Once you have installed the program in your computer, you can benefit from several years’ work of appropriately updated dictionaries, which are updated on a regular basis. To do so, you will have to get the updated dictionary files from the Internet. The instructions for downloading these files from the Internet are found here.

As an Awele client and network facilitator, you are strongly urged to join the working list we have for support to facilitators. It is on that list that we will keep you informed whenever a new dictionary update is put up.

… then, decide how you will continue to update the dictionaries …

On this basis, you will be able to either update the dictionaries yourself, or continue to benefit from the updates that we shall continue to provide for the whole of citizens-alliance facilitators.

The first option allows you to refine the terminology that you are more particularly interested in, depending on your needs. It will require, however, some investment in time.

The second option allows you to benefit from the dictionaries such as they are customized for the whole of the facilitators. The disadvantage, in this case, is that translation choices are made such as to provide an intelligible, but not necessarily precise translation: the translation choice is the one that can be adapted for its “comprehensibility” in any field without necessarily being the best translation for a specific field.

These two options are incompatible. If you update the dictionaries yourself and then use the latest updates proposed for the whole of the facilitators, then you will “overwrite” your file and lose your own changes.

The translation software provides, of course, instructions for use, and it is in fact very user friendly. One of its features is to give you the possibility to do your translations within your usual word-processing program, so you can then edit the raw translation with the editing tools to which you are accustomed.

You will have to define the “translation level”

Depending on the human and financial resources you have at your disposal, and depending on the type of discussion, you need to decide what “translation level” you will provide. Specifically, this means how much editing you will do after the raw production of the MT program.

We have defined the following levels:

Level 0: Raw machine translation, the non-edited output of the translation software.

- Advantage: translation speed (about 135 words / second depending on your OS).

- Disadvantage: some mistranslations, and some syntax and grammar errors

Level 0 provides a very quick "gist" translation that makes it possible to understand what a given text is about (and to decide whether such or such document or part of a document deserves, or requires, a better quality translation).

Level 1: Translation post-edited only for mistranslation, but leaving grammar and syntax errors.

- Advantage: a quick translation (about 100 words / minute) with no mistranslation risk.

- Disadvantage: “heavy” reading.

Level 1 is useful to circulate information quickly in another language. In particular, it allows readers to react to a document in a very brief period of time.

Level 2: Completely post-edited translation, but with no attempt to adapt the style to the target language.

- Advantages: No reading problems, a fair and honest result.

- Disadvantages: Longer translation time (about 30 words / minute with a bit of practice), a literal translation.

Level 2 offers a good, not excellent, translation quality. It makes it possible to provide translations, fairly quickly and at a very reasonable cost, for “internal” circulation.

For reference: A human translation, the quality of which, so-called “publication quality,” remains irreplaceable, is produced at a rate of about 4 words / minute.

For messages on a discussion list, we recommend Level 1. There are several advantages: that of producing the fastest possible translations, that of “forcing” the reader to make an effort to understand, and that of “forcing” the sender to write as clearly as possible.

For forum summaries, working documents, and reports, we recommend Level 2. This takes more time, but allows for more comfortable reading of that which constitutes the working corpus.

For “public” documents, i.e. documents published on the Web site or in the form of a paper, book, etc., “human translation” level is imperative. You can use the raw translation (Level 0) as a “rough draft,” but you will have to work on it until it is up to publication standards from the target-language point of view.

Whenever a machine translation is provided, unless it is post-edited to human-translation quality, this has to be explicitly mentioned at the top of the translation with an indication of the post-editing level (for instance, “Machine translation post-edited for mistranslation only”).