I just wanted to note at this juncture that my notion of running some very simple machine-translation code (yes, lovingly hand-coded in Perl) on a certain class of text, followed by human intervention using just the right kind of editor seems to be bearing fruit.
Granted, I would be in much less deadline trouble right now if I'd just done the Right Thing, shut up, and translated the text. But the text in question is not nicely flowing text. It is PLC message output written by engineers for machine operators, and it is dense. Very, very dense. So if I'd just translated it by hand I would have screwed up over and over.
Instead, I first scanned the entire text, broke it into words (with varying success), and looked up each and every word I didn't know. For those of you who aren't translators, this doesn't just mean not knowing a word at all; it includes not knowing what those particular engineers and machine operators intend to say with a particular technical term. This can be challenging, but in this case I had a lot of previously translated text, so I could look most words up in that.
Once all the words were "known" (ha), I ran the whole thing through a phrase scanner. Frequently occurring phrases were presented with word-by-word translations, along with some crude rewrite rules to make a better guess. This is all very, very naive, as any translator knows. It's not even as good as SYSTRAN, and SYSTRAN sucks.
But as I translated more of the frequent phrases, the system was able to string together better guesses for the longer phrases. At some point, then, I decided to switch over to direct translation of the actual segment list. This text was "nice" (in this one aspect alone) because segmentation was easy -- every line is a separate sentence, so there's no need to figure out where sentences might break. That's convenient.
At any rate, I am now using my specialized text editor to approve and/or modify each resulting phrase. Remember: all the words are already there, sort of, just not usually in an understandable order. Now that I can very quickly select and drag them around, though, my new translating technique is unstoppable. Ha! They said it couldn't be done! Those fools! MWAahahahaha!
(coff) OK, I'm better now. Documentation soon. I just felt enthusiastic.
