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Having used Google Translate to translate at least 6 Russian academic papers in full and about 40% of a Russian dissertation (along with a far larger number of

Having used Google Translate to translate at least 6 Russian academic papers in full and about 40% of a Russian dissertation (along with a far larger number of partial translations of papers), I can say that Google Translate works decently for this task. The result won't win any awards for elegance, but it's by large intelligible. I submitted many corrections over the past years and that seems to have noticeably improved the quality, at the very least reducing the number of gibberish sentences. My contributions are limited to fluid dynamics, so perhaps they won't generalize, but I am very happy with the results. Google in particular had problems with technical phrases which it translated literally, where the literal translation does not correspond to the equivalent English phrase. In one case there was no equivalent English phrase and Google Translate returned a phrase that seemed like it had a Latin etymology. After reverse engineering the word based on the Latin, I recognized the concept and found it interesting that there was a Russian word for this. If I recall I added a footnote explaining the word. Anyway, I doubt your average human translator without subject knowledge could do this. So I don't blame Google Translate for this too much. I have a list of problem sentences that I'll take to a human translator some time in the future. Machine translation has been convenient but does not yet replace human translation even when one sets a fairly low bar as I do.

petra 9y ago
How did you find interesting articles in Russian ? And I assume they contained knowledge not available in English ?
- btrettel 9y ago
  The articles absolutely contained information not available in English. I would not have translated the articles in full if they had, as my time is limited. My specific field is the breakup of liquid jets into droplets. As an example, I found a paper that applied the maximum entropy principle to the prediction of droplet size distributions in 1938 (by V. Ya. Natazon), almost 50 years before the approach was popularized for droplet size in the west (and before Jaynes). I actually was not attracted to the paper for that, though. The specific constraint used involved a measure of the strength of the turbulence, and that was what attracted me as my own research was going in that direction. The constraint would be regarded as novel if it were published in a western journal today. I am working on a conference paper right now which cites this. As for how I find the articles, there are many approaches. I found the Natanzon paper by reading an old English translation of a Russian textbook. Textbooks can be particularly fruitful in terms of foreign references. I also found bibliographies useful to find citations along with English abstracts (though few are recent). Going backwards through the citation network for a particular foreign paper you find interesting can also return good papers. It's also worth noting that in the Cold War era many translations were produced, though they may be hard to track down today. I only translated articles where no previous translation existed best I could tell. I could write more on identifying whether an article was translated and tracking down the translation if you are interested.
  - btrettel 9y ago
    Typo in the comment above: I would not have translated the articles in full if they had not, as my time is limited.

petra 9y ago

How did you find interesting articles in Russian ? And I assume they contained knowledge not available in English ?

btrettel 9y ago
The articles absolutely contained information not available in English. I would not have translated the articles in full if they had, as my time is limited. My specific field is the breakup of liquid jets into droplets. As an example, I found a paper that applied the maximum entropy principle to the prediction of droplet size distributions in 1938 (by V. Ya. Natazon), almost 50 years before the approach was popularized for droplet size in the west (and before Jaynes). I actually was not attracted to the paper for that, though. The specific constraint used involved a measure of the strength of the turbulence, and that was what attracted me as my own research was going in that direction. The constraint would be regarded as novel if it were published in a western journal today. I am working on a conference paper right now which cites this. As for how I find the articles, there are many approaches. I found the Natanzon paper by reading an old English translation of a Russian textbook. Textbooks can be particularly fruitful in terms of foreign references. I also found bibliographies useful to find citations along with English abstracts (though few are recent). Going backwards through the citation network for a particular foreign paper you find interesting can also return good papers. It's also worth noting that in the Cold War era many translations were produced, though they may be hard to track down today. I only translated articles where no previous translation existed best I could tell. I could write more on identifying whether an article was translated and tracking down the translation if you are interested.
- btrettel 9y ago
  Typo in the comment above: I would not have translated the articles in full if they had not, as my time is limited.