What's the easiest (and accurate) way to get some text translated into many languages, for free?

Question

Hello!

I'm working on a webcomic. One of the jokes refers to the "Language" option screen on games. As the characters franticly attempt to locate "English" again in the menu, their dialog is to appear in various interesting looking languages.

What I want to do is translate the dialog into a handful of "interesting looking languages", such as:

English (intro and punchline), Russian, German, Japanese, Basque, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, etc.

I'm looking for an interesting mix of words that use familiar letterforms but interesting grammar/spelling (German), languages that look like they SHOULD be easily recognized (Russian), and languages with really wild and interesting letterforms (Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew).

As this is a webcomic, I can't really afford a professional translation service. Where might I find volunteer translators for a few lines, or a paragraph at most? I want the dialog to be idiomatic and natural, not machine translated and choppy.

An automated translation would be just as bad in this instance as simply picking random interesting letters and stringing 'em togeather.

If somebody who natively reads Japanese sees the comic, I would like for them to understand their specific speech bubble. Or if somebody punches the bubble's contents into babelfish, etc, I want them to have clean text to translate.

Eventually, I'd like to have the comic series translated; this is a segway into that to see how feasable such an undertaking would be (and, no, I'm not planning on locking in anyone who does a simple paragraph into translating the series; think of it as a trial balloon)

I have posted a "Translation Project" page onto the server alongside the webcomic. It can be accessed at this URL:

http://www.missingnumbercomics.com/TranslationProject.html

Details on the text to be translated, the goals, and submission path are there.

I'm also going to follow any advice listed here on pursuing other sources of translation.

Answer 1

I'm willing to do the Dutch, if necessary. Email me via my profile.

Answer 2

I would recommend you do better research. New Testament: While critical of some of its translation choices, BeDuhn called the New World Translation a “remarkably good” translation, “better by far” and “consistently better” than some of the others considered. Overall, concluded BeDuhn, the New World Translation “is one of the most accurate English translations of the New Testament currently available” and “the most accurate of the translations compared.”—Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament. “Here at last is a comprehensive comparison of nine major translations of the Bible: King James Version, New American Standard Bible, New International Version, New Revised Standard Version, New American Bible, Amplified Bible, Today's English Version (Good News Bible), Living Bible, and the New World Translation. The book provides a general introduction to the history and methods of Bible translation, and gives background on each of these versions. Then it compares them on key passages of the New Testament to determine their accuracy and identify their bias. Passages looked at include: John 1:1; John 8:58; Philippians 2:5-11; Colossians 1:15-20; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:8; 2 Peter 1:1 Jason BeDuhn Associate Professor of Religious Studies, and Chair Department of Humanities, Arts, and Religion Northern Arizona University In the book "How To Choose Your Bible Wisely", by A.S.Duthie. Duthie recommended the NWT as one of the three bibles 'serious bible students' should own. The other two were, the NASB and the RSV. .

Answer 3

Here are two sites:

http://www.babelfish.com

http://www.freetranslation.com

If you need to translate into languages not covered by these sites, you might want to try using a search engine with the three words: translation english language_you're_looking_for (i.e. translation english german).

Understand that these translation sites are very generic, and that the translation you get won't be the same as the actual native language; the grammar will appear much as a foreign site translated by such as BabelFish appears to us, (e.g. "Broken English").

Answer 4

Try posting in the Kudoz section of Proz.com. Volunteers will translate sentences or phrases of ten words or less.

Answer 5

just post the text here, ppl will translate it, if it is big spread it in several questions at giving one day of interval.

Answer 6

You'll find it lying next to the heaviest, lightest, blackest, white-est, wrong-est, right-est thing.

Answer 7

type dictionary,translation (then type what lang to what lang)

Answer 8

have u tried dictionary.com??

Answer 9

did you try babelfish.com?