[Guillo]

Originally Posted by avinoam.aharoni

Hi,
I have a document in french, I wish to translate it to English - it doesn't have to be a profesional translation, but its a 200 page document, and it is due on my bosses table by Thursday...
anything Word can do for me (other than to help me write my resignation/suicide letter)?
Thanks,
Avi.

Well, yes and know. The other guys are quite right, Word won't help you translate and machine translators give out... "unorthodox" results, to say the least. However, google translator and babel talk are not as useless as you may think.
What need to is perfectly possible, though it will take a lot of annoying work. First, copy and paste your documents onto google/babel, and then paste the translated text on a blank Word. Due to character number restrictions, you'll have to this piece by piece.
Once you have it complete, simply rewrite the text in order to make it readable. The auto translation, bad as it may be, should give you an idea of the meaning, you just need to edit it into real english. Whenever you don't understand... well, just get creative and make sure what you write sounds convincing! Then, just export the Word file as pdf once you have copied the format of the original file.
Good luck!

[Samadado]

Originally Posted by Guillo

Well, yes and know. The other guys are quite right, Word won't help you translate and machine translators give out... "unorthodox" results, to say the least. However, google translator and babel talk are not as useless as you may think.
What need to is perfectly possible, though it will take a lot of annoying work. First, copy and paste your documents onto google/babel, and then paste the translated text on a blank Word. Due to character number restrictions, you'll have to this piece by piece.
Once you have it complete, simply rewrite the text in order to make it readable. The auto translation, bad as it may be, should give you an idea of the meaning, you just need to edit it into real english. Whenever you don't understand... well, just get creative and make sure what you write sounds convincing! Then, just export the Word file as pdf once you have copied the format of the original file.
Good luck!

this is very useful, thank you! Translating documents, especially books or parts of books, is always a very interesting and important process, meticulous and difficult. For example, recently found information on the translation of The Cask of Amontillado by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, see it here. A very important semantic load was simply lost in translation.