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Software for Translation
Does anyone have any experience with software for translating from German to English? I have tried Google Translate but that leaves much to be desired in the result. What is considered to be the best software available and what is the approximate cost. We have several books to be translated. Does anyone know which program is used by the EU? Your help would be much appreciated.
At the commission they use a machine translation tool. Looks like it's developed in-house probably.
As Paul said, the Commission has its own in-house tool. It is open to outside, but only to those working in public administrations in EU countries so most likely not for you (although of course you may know someone working for the government in a Member State, who could test it for you): http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/translationresources/machine_transla...
The Commission used to work with Systran for many decades until there was an acrimonious breakup, a court case and general nastiness. Anyway, Systran could be a good place to start looking for commercial machine-translation software. http://www.systransoft.com/translation-products/desktop/
However you should be aware that machine translation is still in its infancy and machine translation can never replace a human translator (personally I'm not sure we will ever get to a point where this would be possible).
The best you can hope for is to get a raw translation and text which will give you the general gist of the meaning of the original. If the intention would be to use it for anything else, it will need very heavy and time-consuming editing from a native speaker.
To end on a lighter note: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. Try to get a machine translation system make sense of that one.
SDL Trados is probably the best easily available translation tool.
http://www.translationzone.com/
Babelfish used to ok but not sure about what your asking for
