Reading my writing translated

I have knacks, but not for language. I still remember a bit of the old country however. Which is why it's neat to try to read a blog post - in French (see the drop down on the right side of this page to translate)

Some of it reads sensibly, other bits less so. Some of the word choices seem exotic.

I expect there's a knack to writing for translation. One would author a post, then do a round trip translation. Identify the parts that, on back translation, don't quite work. Do this a couple of times with your target language. Once the back translation is acceptable, you can be reasonably sure the initial translation works.

This would be fairly easy to automate. I'd like to give it a try if the tools were in place. I'm excited about machine translation, even if it's so far had less of an impact than I'd expected.

See also:

• Google reader: now with translation services

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