Microsoft Translator (Bing Translator) & Parallel Texts

[Montmorency]

Who knew that Microsoft Translator could produce halfway decent parallel texts almost without trying?

(OK, I'll bet Iversen did, but then, there is very little he doesn't know about parallel texts...)

(Who even knew that Microsoft Translator still existed? I for one had totally forgotten about it).

It's nowadays part of Bing. I just googled for "Microsoft Translator" and clicked on the first link I came to.

I mean, maybe I just got lucky, and maybe it doesn't work so well with all texts, but anyway, I was pleasantly surprised.

I'd downloaded some subtitles from a Youtube video (something else I've only just found out how to do). I chose the text option (rather than SRT). The resulting text file didn't look very user-friendly, as all the lines seemed to be concatenated together. However, there must have been invisible line separators, because when I pasted it into MT/BT (it wouldn't take a .txt file as input - input files have to be .doc or .ppt), it appeared as separate lines, separated by blank lines.

I then hit "translate" and Bob's your uncle: the translation appeared opposite, very nearly lining up, line by line. Well, actually it got out of sync in a few places, but it wasn't bad at all.

It could fairly easily be copied into columns in a Word or Open Office document and tidied up with not too much effort (I would have thought).

Results are obviously going to vary with the exact nature of the text, but it seems like something worth experimenting with. I certainly intend to keep playing with it.


Edit: oops: sorry, MT/BT doesn't take files as input at all (at least not the free version). I was getting it mixed up with DeepL which I'd been trying earlier. It's DeepL that only takes .doc or .ppt files. Unfortunately, it does not have Czech in its language offerings, which was the language I was trying to translate from.