Well, October is all but finished, and I can hardly believe where the time has gone. Well, I know where the last week has gone at least, and that’s been busy transcribing old Hennig papers in German. This is one of the greatest challenges to the science of taxonomy in my mind, needing to critically review all prior information on the taxa of interest. Getting the papers in the first place is often an issue, especially when they’re published in obscure journals from the 1800’s, but once you have them, the real work begins trying to decipher the text. Not only is the obvious language barrier standing in the way, but also the obscure entomological terms that most translators can’t catch and, with the older papers, old lexicon which also isn’t always easily translated. With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of the resources I use for translating these papers (from languages including French, German, Portugese and Spanish).

As with most things on the internet these days, Google is my first choice, and in this case, Google Translate. I’ve found that the translations from Google are much better (when reading the results back in English, not doing a direct translation comparison) than say Yahoo’s Babel Fish (is there a trend here between search engine popularity and translation success? Hmmmm…). Even some complicated German compound words are easily readable after a quick run through Google Translate. Other pros for Google? Real-time translation, allowing you to break up those long compound words which confound the software, and the ability to upload entire Word documents to be translated at once. I find typing accented letters in a word processor much easier than online, speeding up the process in many cases (and also allowing you to save your transcribed files for later instead of evapourating into the ether of the web). I’d say that 95% of my translating needs are met with Google Translate. Another added benefit? Google recently added Latin translation, allowing you to check the etymology of taxon names, or invent your own!

Sometimes when you read over your translated text, you’ll come across a word or term that doesn’t seem to fit or make sense. In these cases I turn to the Woxikon Online Dictionary, which provides a list of synonyms for translated words. This website is only for individual words and not mass blocks of text, but it has helped me make sense of some rather odd sentences! Woxicon works for a bevy of languages (although not as extensive as Google) covering most of the languages in classic taxonomic papers.

Of course, neither of these sites are much good with detailed morphological terms, although in many instances I find I can guess the correct structure based on similarity to English, or by comparing to specimens (i.e. looking for the red sclerite on the thorax, and then determining that was the katepisternum).

Now my question to all you taxonomists (and anyone else dealing with similar linguistics issues): how do you go about translating papers? Do you have access to a multi-lingual colleague in your department, speak multiple languages yourself, or have other resources for this sort of thing? Leave your solutions below in the comments!

UPDATE: After finally finishing transcribing Hennig, I found that Google Translate had some issues translating the entire document (26 pages) and took a few tries to translate the whole thing. After finally getting everything translated, I found I couldn’t download the text, and copy & pasting resulted in both the English and German versions getting transferred in a mixed format. The solution? I uploaded my Word document to Google Docs, used the translation service (again needing 3 tries to perform the entire translation) and then downloaded the file back to my computer for reading later. Overall, easy to do (other than the need to translate it multiple times) and with pretty decent results.