Translate in Word 2003 from English to Spanish?

[RobinB]

I have several documents and signs in English that I have created for
customers. The customers are now requesting that I make them documents &
signs in both English & Spanish. Is there a way to select the text that I
have, and translate it to Spanish?

 

[Jay Freedman]

I have several documents and signs in English that I have created for
customers. The customers are now requesting that I make them
documents & signs in both English & Spanish. Is there a way to select
the text that I have, and translate it to Spanish?

Yes, you can do that...

Select the text, hold the Alt key, and click on the selection. The Research
task pane opens. The first time, you'll have to set the search type to
"Translation" and set the from/to languages. For some reason, the results
are below a very large blank space, so you have to scroll down to see them.

This may work well enough for the short phrases on the average sign. Still,
you'll want to have the results checked by someone who is familiar with the
particular dialect(s) spoken by your customers. Words that are perfectly
ordinary in, say, Castilian Spanish may have unsavory connotations in, say,
Mexican or Cuban Spanish. The machine translation in Word won't tell you any
of that.

But if you have to have a person check the translations, why not just have
that person write the translations in the first place?

 

[Robinb]

Jay,
Thank you for the info. The only problem I have is that the users that need
to do the translation does not have internet access, therefore, they can not
access the wordlingo site. I need to know if there is something internal in
Office that will allow this to be done.

 

[Jay Freedman]

No, there isn't. The translation feature is provided by a web service only.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Actually, Jay, I think the French and Spanish translations are available
offline (but only for one word at a time). And note that you can select the
"flavor" of Spanish you want. Not that I wouldn't still caution users about
the use of any kind of machine translation, and especially of word-for-word
translation, which would probably be worse than useless for most phrases.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Actually, Jay, I think the French and Spanish translations are available
offline (but only for one word at a time). And note that you can select the
"flavor" of Spanish you want. Not that I wouldn't still caution users about
the use of any kind of machine translation, and especially of word-for-word
translation, which would probably be worse than useless for most phrases.

Yes, I see that now (hadn't played with the off-line version and
remembered what we were shown before Word 2003 shipped). But the
"flavors" I see are Modern Sort vs. Traditional Sort, which IIRC
refers to where letters such as ñ appear in alphabetic ordering.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Okay, hadn't tried it recently, but you'd think if the proofing tools have
all those flavors they'd offer them in translation as well.