I am a teacher and have students who speak many different languages. The most common ones are Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese, but we have other folks speaking other languages as well.
I wish to translate all my notes, lecture subtitles, and topic-exercise documents to other languages. Moreover every year, I have to update my teaching material and include new stuff. So, muddling though everything manually is not much of an option as it might take up to two months just for this task.
Are there nice self hosted and libre/open source solutions out there for this task?
Translator here. They do make up stuff or omit stuff they don’t like. Machine translation is fine for tourists or to translate a ikea manual in the wrong language. If there are stakes, risky. They got good enough to make sentences that look right so it can be tricky to spot the errors if you don’t pay attention.
Numbers are typical errors. Sometimes it’s there but the number has changed. Sometimes it’s not there at all. Oh and if you have currencies a translators knows a document from the UK in pounds that is adapted for France will have to be converted in euros. Machines don’t.
Generally speaking when a client wants to use machine translation, it costs them more money in the end because of the extra time needed to correct everything to a high human grade standard.