Frequently Asked Questions

The questions in this FAQ are not really asked frequently, but they are questions that may explain the meaning of Transtalo.

Why are you doing this?

I know, there are serveral translation machines, BabelFish, AltaVista, Google, but they are not open source and free (as in speech). Also, they won't support very much languages, and idiom isn't well translated.

And Transtalo does it all?

Not yet, but I hope so in the future. Supporting much languages can only be done with a huge team. Supporting idiom is somewhat easier.

Is there a main difference between existing machine translators and Transtalo?

Yes. Transtalo uses a different concept. Existing machine translators have translation modules for combinations of languages, for example English into French, English into German. Transtalo has apart translation modules for source languages and target languages, called input and output modules. For example, if you want to translate a sentence from English into French, the English input module is called, and the French output module is called. The input module translates from English and the output module into French.

Why that?

Because the number of needed modules increases less fast as we are supporting more languages. For example: if we want to fully support 20 languages, to be able to translate directly from every language to every other language, we would need to make 20 * 20 / 2 = 200 modules. If we want to do the same, but Transtalo's way, we would need to make only 40 modules: 20 output modules and 20 input modules. 40 is still a huge number, but very less than 200.

What's wrong with doing everything via English?

Information loss. For example: English does not make difference between a formal 'you' and an informal 'you'. Many others do. If you want to translate a sentence from German into French, by translating it to English first, the translator that has to translate the sentence from English into French won't know if the 'you' is a formal 'you' or an informal 'you'.

Do you think translation machines will ever be perfect?

No, not perfect. Human translation will always be better. But a machine translation can be used to understand a text that isn't written in your language. I'm sure Transtalo won't make human translation redundant.