Best option to translate chapters written in other languages into english?

C

chris_brown

Really Experienced
Does anyone know the best place to go that translates Spanish or French to English for chapters beyond 5000 words that won't cost an arm and a leg to use?
 
I'm fluent in French but have extremely limited sex-term vocab in French; so I can give you the gist of it. Simply put Google Translate is half-decent but currently AI translators are pretty bad. For sentence-by-sentence translation I'm willing to if I have the time which I rarely do. French is my second which means translating to English (my native) is easy for me. Other way around not so much.
 
OccasionalReader said:
I'm fluent in French but have extremely limited sex-term vocab in French; so I can give you the gist of it. Simply put Google Translate is half-decent but currently AI translators are pretty bad. For sentence-by-sentence translation I'm willing to if I have the time which I rarely do. French is my second which means translating to English (my native) is easy for me. Other way around not so much.
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This is one of the chapters I've been wanting see translated ever since it was posted https://chyoa.com/chapter/Se-battre.1445682
 
OccasionalReader said:
The good news? Pretty simple French, there was only one word that I didn't recognize. You want the translation to preserve meaning, prose, or strike a balance? The capitalization is super weird as a warning though, likely there's context from earlier that I'm missing
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All I'm looking for is a general French to English translation so I can enjoy as much as the author intended when they wrote the chapter to begin with, seeing as I can only read/write English, this is a handicap for me......
 
chris_brown said:
All I'm looking for is a general French to English translation so I can enjoy as much as the author intended when they wrote the chapter to begin with, seeing as I can only read/write English, this is a handicap for me......
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Ah in this case the Google auto translate should work pretty well since it's non-erotic writing for that chapter - let me just verify real quick

Okay it's 99% accurate with the following exceptions:
  1. In French object pronouns agree with the object rather than the subject, which results in some hilarious he in translation when it should always be she in the text
  2. There is a French grammatical error where the infinitive is used when it shouldn't, but Google correctly translates the intention anyways interestingly enough
  3. Halfway down the page it translates "redevient" as "becomes" - a more faithful translation would be "is becoming." However, I can only fathom to guess whether the tense used was correct, it maybe should not be the present tense given that everything surrounding it - with exception to a time injection - is in the past tense. I would need to understand the wider context surrounding past chapters to know for sure on this one.
  4. There's a few grammatical errors actually, in particular the weird capitalization bothers me. However, these originate in the French and are not flaws in the translation
 
Machine translation can help you understand the gist of the a text, but its output won't exactly be literary. At best, it'll read like a highschooler wrote it.

I wouldn't bother with mediocre translations from other language, given how much actually good English erotic fiction is out there.
 
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