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I've found interesting sounding reference written in Czech.

If wanting to read non-English references, then are there translators that work well for science papers?

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  • Did you wish to pay a person?
    – Anonymous Physicist
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 11:33
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    By "translator", do you mean a person or an algorithm?
    – henning no longer feeds AI
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 13:23
  • @henning--reinstateMonica Anything reasonable to be used in research activities.
    – mavavilj
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 13:24
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    I once copy and pasted the entire transcribed text of an Italian-language paper published in 1908 into Google Translate. Translation was far from perfect, but was good enough that I felt comfortable citing it in my dissertation. Although, many of the chemical and biological names had odd or unnecessary translations, so I had to keep the original text close by to cross reference suspicious words in the translated text. Looking back, it was a lot of work for one or two sentences in my introduction, but credit where credit is due and all that.
    – MikeyC
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 16:00

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I would say DeepL. It's a free-to-use, machine-learning based translator. It deals with technical terms way better than google translate does. However, it doesn't support Czech, so it probably wont solve your problem.

Of course, it's not perfect, and as stated in other comments here... the more complex the subject is, the less probable it is that any translator will give you an accurate answer.

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Based on getting things like google translate to translate technical terms, I have to go with NO.

Works fine for simple language but technical language is a different game.

Even people who claim to be bi-lingual cannot translate technical information. I had this argument once and gave a lady who claimed she could translate anything a paper on stresses and buckling in 3 dimensions which proved she could not. :)

I have done some work translating a paper or two between 2 languages and it is challenging even for an engineer who understands the concepts to make sure what is stated is what is meant.

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  • And especially for math.
    – Buffy
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 10:44
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    @Buffy Math is a bit of a weird edge case. Expository parts of papers are next to impossible to translate without knowledge of both the language and the underlying math, but in the calculation heavy parts all text boils down to some variation of "let ... be" and "next we calculate ...".
    – mlk
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 13:50
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    Let me add that there is indeed the profession of technical translators (translating eg patent applications). Of course, they cost money.
    – user111388
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 15:32
  • Hey, Downvoter, you only did one today - one more required... :)
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Sep 17, 2020 at 20:49

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