My question is for those of you who have translated multiple documents, what would you recommend and why? Am I missing any other alternative way to translate our materials?
Well, there are lots of ways that involve commercial services, and either human translators, or human editors correcting machine translation, but these are typically more expensive than DIYing the formatting on AI-driven translation. For some kinds of translation - especially relating to health, PHI, or regulatory compliance - there are really strong arguments against relying on AI. But I don't imagine that your small community college has these kinds of concerns.
One way you can estimate the scale of such concerns is this: you can ask yourself "What are the consequences of an incorrect translation?" Because the consequences scale, to a degree; "I didn't make the sale" isn't as bad as "The reader filed an accessibility lawsuit over it." Lawsuite are better, in the grand scheme, than "the reader was injured as a result of believing the incorrect translation." I just saw a Critical Error a few months ago, where the poorly trained AI confused the Chinese glyphs for weeks, months, and days. That doesn't sound that bad, but it was a childcare handbook describing the ages at which children could be left alone, and for how long. So, that particular incorrect translation could have resulted in the death of a child. The moral of my little story here is that you shouldn't skip the part where you hire an editor who already knows how to do post-MT review.
So, I can absolutely make some suggestions if you're interested (20+ years in the language industry, have formatted billions of words in dozens of languages over those years), but my advice is likely to be right out of your budget. (For example, if I were given your job, I would absolutely get the best translations I could for the English documents I already had in my archive, and then I would use the new translations to build bilingual corpora. Then I would use that data to roll my own machine translation tool based off of the vetted corpora, and could apply that to all new projects henceforth. ) But how much volume are you looking at, here? How many words in your archives currently, and what is your projected volume of new translations? Those numbers will let you estimate your total cost per year, right? That will help you figure out which tool will likely be the most cost-effective.
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