HOW TO CONVERT THEN TRANSLATE A DOCUMENT

[pelowskicoli]

Hi there,
I receive a few letters written in Greek and have no idea how to translate them.
I have scanned them and then tried to convert them to English.
I tried to convert from JPEG to a RTL format with some free software but it doesnt work as it changes it to numbers and squigles not the same images so to speak.

I need somehow to convert it so i can Copy and Paste then put it into Windows translate or something like that.

Scanning gives me the JPEG but I dont know what is the next step

Any Ideas? Thanks

[grasscarp]

if all else fails you could go on one of the translation sites like paralink. It has a little keyboard and you can select the language. It will be tedious, but the only other option is to find a Greek person. Do you have a local Greek restaurant? Mind you it will probably not have a real Greek there!

[RATTER15]

Realistically I would say this is not possible, the online translators are notoriously unreliable as are most text recognition programmes in my experience. Someone may come on and tell you differently, lets hope so :-)

[grasscarp]

You might have to pay a translation service.

[ChuckFickens]

You would need to do two steps, both of which are notoriously unreliable.

the first step would be to use OCR (optical character recognition) software that supports the Greek alphabet to convert the written document into proper text the computer recognises. OCR software is temperamental at the best of times (even using printed text) so if they are hand written letters there is little chance this will work well.

Once you have it in a format the computer recognised as text rather than a JPEG (which is essentially just a photo of the letter) you would have to run it through a translation site such a babelfish ( http://babelfish.yahoo.com/ ) to convert it from Greek to English.

the problem is with any language conversion is that every language uses different sentence structures, so the results from any computer translation will read like pigeon English at best and be indecipherable at worst.

To give an example, I will translate this sentence to Greek and then back to English using babelfish.

In Greek it translates to (and I bet this is dreadful Greek.. (rojash??)

Για να δώσω ένα παράδειγμα, θα μεταφράσω αυτήν την πρόταση στα ελληνικά και έπειτα πίσω στα αγγλικά χρησιμοποιώντας babelfish.

and then translated straight back to English comes out as

In order to I give a example, I will then translate this prop

[ChuckFickens]

damm it... AB but the end of my answer of... the sentence translated back to English comes out as

In order to I give a example, I will then translate this proposal in Greek and behind in the English using babelfish.

[pelowskicoli]

thank you to everyone. I am going to have a go but it may be a regular dose of Moussaka and chips!!!