opolt Nov 20, 2011:

Agree w/ Irene My thoughts exactly.

Irene Schlotter, Dipl.-Übers. Nov 20, 2011:

Client - Machine translation Hi Martina, your client will most likely NOT understand what you mean and just question your doubts and/or qualification - at least that is my experience with clients who have their material MTed (often with a corpus of deplorable quality) and then want professional linguists to 'improve' it. I for my part tend to decline MTed jobs - I simply can't afford to spend so much time on so little money, asking many different people on their opinion. The problem with MT is more often than not due to badly worded source text that is no good for machine translation.

Martina Kilgo (asker) Nov 19, 2011:

@Horst. Thank you for this important info Horst :) I informed my client about the syntax issues and gave him both translation options. I explained (at least I tried :) ) the difference to him in English, and will let him choose what he considers most suitable.

Horst Huber (X) Nov 19, 2011:

Der Zusammenhang sollte die syntaktische Doppeldeutigkeit klären. "There is no ... to ..." sagt entweder, "es existiert kein ... den man kompilieren könnte," oder "hier ist kein ... , den man kompilieren sollte, oder müßte", "hier ist keine Notwendigkeit, einen ... zu kompilieren."

opolt Nov 19, 2011:

Epic Really.

Don't take it personally Martina -- I sincerely wish you good luck nevertheless.

Martina Kilgo (asker) Nov 19, 2011:

Thank you all so much for your help. :) I wish I had more context myself, but the client had a text machine translated and wants it edited. He extracted single sentences out of the machine translation for edition. What I get out of the whole thing as far as context goes is that he tries to use a server application to test a browser but his Java is outdated. The sentences before the ones in question are: Please choose a browser from the dropdown. Your Java version is outdated. Do you want to go to the Java site now? The file{0} could not be found. Failed to start selenium server.

Chavva Schneider (X) Nov 19, 2011:

It does... ... make sense - in a way. The "Test-Code" though, I would regard as a bit unlucky. Maybe you could change it to "Test-Daten". On the other hand, "compile" does not mean "aufzeichnen", but "record" does. Then again, "code" would make perfect sense! The software giving this prompt needs some code to compute which is to be imported from the results of a test that has been made before. This is how I understand the English part.
Then, I would suggest as German translation: Kein Test-Code zur Verarbeitung vorhanden. Bitte erfassen Sie zuerst Testdaten/einen Test. (the latter if "a test" is being mentioned more often and is understood by the user as the entity of all data referring to one of many possible tests done.)
Maybe you could give us a bit more context for reassurance?

@Leonhard: TEST, not text... nifug

Leonhard Schmeiser Nov 19, 2011:

Zeichnen Sie zuerst einen Text auf, als Vorschlag für den zweiten Teil.