New Avalanche Bulletins - no automated translations possible - Please let us have your comments

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14 December, 2011 - 18:15
#1
Chris Radford
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Joined: 22 Jun 2010
New Avalanche Bulletins - no automated translations possible - Please let us have your comments

Meteo France have relaunched their Avalanche Bulletins. The new bulletins are much richer in information and potentially very valuable. Please do take a look. For example

http://france.meteofrance.com/france/MONTAGNE?MONTAGNE_PORTLET.path=mont...

Meteo France have a concern that some of the automatic translations we and others have been promoting are not always accurate and may be potentially misleading. As a result they have posted the bulletin as an image file that cannot be translated or edited in any way. This protects the integrity of their published statement.

This creates 2 issues

1. It means we cannot publish a translated bulletin unless we invest 30 -60 minutes each rewriting it manually. It also means that you are unable to translate it except by using your own skills in French. As a resul the bulletin is less clear to people who do not speak French sufficiently well.
2. It also means that people with eyesight difficulties can use the usual web browser tools to make the information easier to tread

We would welcome your comments on this situation. Henry is planning to talk with meteo France, it would help to get your input and perspective. Please do add your comments. This will help Henry to discuss this issue.

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20 March, 2012 - 15:49
#2
stulou
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Joined: 29 Sep 2011
meteo and pistehors

yes it's a problem, well a prob for me at any rate. pistehors is off as well i guess they come from the same place?
and although i'm taking lessons in french (not having done it at school) and it's getting better the avalanche bulletin is way beond me i can guess at it but i don't want to. i get the basics the stuff with numbers but it's a real shame when i give henrys avalanche talk and i'm telling my guests that it's not much good knowing the avalanche rating if you don't know how to apply it to the mountian and you need the bullitin to do that as the the one depends on the other.
sunes' post is a great tip but a little technical for a lot of people.
what to do?
sorry i've only questions and no solution
stu

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29 December, 2011 - 12:45
#3
AlanDH
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Joined: 28 Dec 2011
Meteo France Avanlanche reports

Perhaps if we're living in France and using the Meteo France website we should put the effort into learning French. This is too important for keen skiers/boarders not to understand it correctly. Everyone I know says their experience of living here is greatly enhanced by the abilty to communicate with our hosts in their language.

Alan DH

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21 December, 2011 - 18:59
#4
skiPresto
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Joined: 19 Feb 2011
Translations

Hi
Well said on the OCR facility of Google Docs.
May I suggest a recursive-translation to check the accuracy?
(By this I mean copy the translated English back into the From Box and translate it back to French. See if it is the same. If it isn't translate it again back to English and zero in on the meaning changes.)
use http://translate.google.com
It also gives options for alternative meanings simply by hovering and clicking the output words.

However, the Meteo France need to be unambiguous. They usually have stock phrases they use all the time. We need to have strong confidence in the translations of these.
I have intermediate French speaking ability and manage to understand 99% of it with confidence.
Do we have details of what and when the translation was incorrect/misleading?
Regards
Dave Cuthill
SkiPresto.Com

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14 December, 2011 - 20:55
#5
Sune
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Joined: 14 Dec 2011
Google is your friend

Hello Chris

It takes more than a simple image to beat almighty google :-)
Here's what to do:
1. Save the image to your hard drive
2. Go to your google docs account
3. Upload the image and tell google to ocr scan it, thus inserting the image and the text extracted into a new document.
4. Go to functions -> translate document, and translate it to any language you want.

Other than that I think Meteo France's concern is valid, and ideally some sort of cooporation should be set up between meteo france, and the many bilingual off piste guides in france. After all 30-60 minutes worth of translation isn't that huge an investment, considering its your primary business area that's concerned. So split the work between the various off piste operators.

All the best
Sune

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14 December, 2011 - 20:33
#6
gbeckram
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Joined: 30 Dec 2010
I clicked on the link on my

I clicked on the link on my iPhone and their website gave me a link to the mobile site version. Clicking on menu then mountain bulletin gets to a text version of the avalanche bulletin. Might be worth exploring whether you can automate a translation from that?

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