Auto-translated manuals

[Jeff_Birt]

I recently imported some Sharp gear from Japan which luckily came with the users' manuals. The manuals were in Japanese of course which I do not know. On a whim I scanned the documents and touched up the scans like I normally would. Then the 'Images' option of Google translate was used to translate each page, one at a time, into English. The nice thing is that it pastes the translation over the original text keeping the original format of the document.

The translation is not bad. It is not perfect of course but it produces a useable document allowing you to learn how to use the device. The first manual processed this way was the Sharp CE-515P. The auto-translate was really confused by the Katakana character tables though and the converted text is humorous. Someone in France later found a poor scan of the English version which I cleaned up as much as possible and added to same page on Archive.org. Links below.

Just thought I would share this as it is quite nice to have some sort of documentation even if it is not perfect. The automatic translation is really quite impressive.

https://archive.org/details/sharp-ce-162...l_English/

https://archive.org/details/sharp-ce-515...anslation/