convertering charachters from English to Chinese

[steve kelly]

Anyone done this?
I need to convert English charachters to chinese before I send my stuff to xml. Is there something out there that I can use that will do this for me?

[Paul Clapham]

Can you explain that a bit more? For example would you be looking for a method which converts the letter "T" to Chinese?

[steve kelly]

yeah...so if I had
<PARTY2_TYPE>Consignee</PARTY2_TYPE>

I would want my java code to convert it to where CHINESE CHARACHTERS is actual chinese
<PARTY2_TYPE>CHINESE CHARACHTERS</PARTY2_TYPE>

[Paul Clapham]

Okay... this doesn't correspond to anything I know about Chinese. So could you explain what you would expect to be the result of converting the letter "T" to Chinese?

Or here's another guess: when you said "converting characters" did you really mean that you wanted a Chinese translation of a phrase in English?

[steve kelly]

yes, I basically want a chinese translation for certain words

[fred rosenberger]

do you have the list of words you want translated, and what the translation is? In other words, do you already have a mapping for your domain?

[steve kelly]

fred rosenberger wrote:do you have the list of words you want translated, and what the translation is? In other words, do you already have a mapping for your domain?

nope, was hoping there was some kind of jar or utility or somethign I could call which would automajically translate my english to chinese. apparently not.

[Bear Bibeault]

Perhaps you could find a web service to perform this task for you?

[Jeff Verdegan]

steve kelly wrote:

fred rosenberger wrote:do you have the list of words you want translated, and what the translation is? In other words, do you already have a mapping for your domain?

nope, was hoping there was some kind of jar or utility or somethign I could call which would automajically translate my english to chinese. apparently not.

Certainly not as part of the core API, and it wouldn't really be reasonable to expect there to be. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some thirdparty library out there, that contains anywhere from a simple mapping of common words and phrases in one language to their equivalents in another languages, to something more sophisticated that tries to actually translate on the fly.

Note that as you move along the spectrum toward the latter, it is less likely to be free of charge and more likely to produce unreliable results. Natural language translation is a horrifically complex task that even after decades of research is only barely beginning to scratch the surface of rudimentary capabilities.

Also note that for simple mappings, the library wouldn't even need any executable code. Just one or more text files full of key/value pairs would be sufficient. Also note, however, that if you need specialized terminology for a particular domain, it will be harder to find.

[Paul Clapham]

No. Hire somebody to do the Chinese translation for you. The web is full of ***FAIL*** pages which depict the comical and/or embarrassing results of translations done by incompetent translators; often those translators have used Google Translate or some other automated translation tools which don't do a good job.

[fred rosenberger]

you can't simply translate word for word. Many words have multiple meanings, depending on context. Think about it..."Raining cats and dogs" or "Out of site, out of mind" cannot be translated word-for-word. It is the entire phrase that has meaning.

[Jeff Verdegan]

fred rosenberger wrote:you can't simply translate word for word. Many words have multiple meanings, depending on context. Think about it..."Raining cats and dogs" or "Out of site, out of mind" cannot be translated word-for-word. It is the entire phrase that has meaning.

Not only that, but even aside from idioms and aphorisms, simple declarative sentences have very different structure from one language to the next.

For instance, in Spanish, "(Yo) me llamo Jeff", if translated literally word by word would be "(I) myself I call Jeff", but when applying the standard pattern for reflexive verb usage, we get, "I am called Jeff," which makes more sense, but still is an unusual phrasing. If we take it a step further, we find that it's actually the Standard Spanish equivalent of "My name is Jeff."

And that's a very simple phrase in a language that is about as close to English as any.

If we take a fairly simple sentence in Japanese, "Asoko ni sushi tabeteiru hito ha Jeff desu," and translate it word by word, we get, "Over there at sushi is eating person as for Jeff is". Rearranging the word order to a syntactically valid English sentence, we get something like, "As for the person eating sushi over there, it/he is Jeff." Or, ultimately, translated to a "normal" Enlgish that conveys the same meaning as the original Japanese, "The person eating sushi over there is Jeff."

So, yeah, for anything but a handful of simple stock words and phrases, you're going to need an expert. Especially if the context involves legal documents, as your example suggests it does.