Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
There is a new wiki page started by a reader called Multilingual eBook Conversion that opens an interesting idea that deserves some discussion. I am thinking about make a few pages to augment this page. Does anyone else think this is intriguing? What do you guys think? Is automation good enough to play a role?
Dale |
Formatting an ebook written in some language other than English is never going to apply to me. I might have an intellectual interest/curiosity in knowing what some of the issues are - any distraction is a good distraction - but I have no vested interest.
Automated language translation is an interesting idea - although this isn't necessarily ebook specific. But I don't think I'd trust it, not on its own. I can imagine that an automated translation, which is then edited by someone conversant in that language, could conceivably provide some overall time saving ... maybe. But that's the thing, I don't really know enough about other languages to have any idea of the issues.
I do think that automated translation into speech (audio book) is a related* but more achievable objective with current technology levels. I've seen how it works, and while direct conversion is not perfect there are ways to instruct the voice software to adjust itself dynamically - so distributing ebooks ready-to-be-read in a voice of the reader's choosing is well within current capabilities.
* I see it as related because there is a contextual aspect to both that automation will have difficulty encapsulating - at least until a learning Artificial Intelligence is brought to bear on this.