Need German speakers to sort out translation problem

[Stylesjl]

I know that babelfish is a crap translator but i seem to have quite a bit of trouble with this word

"Achtang"

It translates to "Oh Seaweed"

Yet "Seaweed" translates to "Meerespflanze"

"Tang" also translates to "Seaweed"

So which words are correct? Babelfish is so confusing

 

[emzie]

Context? I've never seen that word before

 

[GenMarshall]

Babelfish is not a good tool to use when translating from one language to another. Namely it does not take into account grammar and context rules.

 

[emzie]

Babelfish is not a good tool to use when translating from one language to another. Namely it does not take into account grammar and context rules.

It does too take into account grammar. Not perfectly, but it does. However, you can't screw it up. "Where are we going to?" would come out wrong "To where are we going?" should come out fine.

 

[Arcadian83]

Achtung (with a 'u') means "Attention" or "Warning".
Not sure if this is what you meant.

Google seems to think 'Achtang' should be 'Achtung', perhaps where you read it was misspelled.

 

[emzie]

Achtung (with a 'u') means "Attention" or "Warning".
Not sure if this is what you meant.

I can't believe I over-looked that.

 

[Stylesjl]

Interesting because "Attention" comes out as "Aufmerksamkeit" yet when putting "achtung" in it goes to "Attention"

Conclusion: Babelfish sucks. Anyone got any better German translators out there?

BTW Arcadian, that was the orginal meaning i was looking for. Thats why i was so suprised when it came out as "Seaweed"

 

[emzie]

Aufmerksamkeit does translate attention, as a noun, like to bring to my attention.

Try 'Attention!'

 

[Arcadian83]

Glad to be of help. Babelfish is indeed a primative translator. I suspect it tries to use word equivalents for each word, entirely missing semantics and context. I do not know of any more sophisticated translators that are free to use, however.

WorldLingo has been slightly better, in my experience.

 

[Goa]

I know that babelfish is a crap translator but i seem to have quite a bit of trouble with this word

"Achtang"

It translates to "Oh Seaweed"

Yet "Seaweed" translates to "Meerespflanze"

"Tang" also translates to "Seaweed"

So which words are correct? Babelfish is so confusing

In fact, the word "Achtang" doesn't exist, so babelfish probably decomposed it to "Ach Tang", which doesn't make much more sense either, but which can be translated word by word to Oh seaweed.
A comment on automatic translators: Everybody who is learning a foreign language knows that often words can have different meanings, and still quite often there doesn't exist a one to one correspondence of one word in the other language. So in order to say what you want to say in another language sometimes needs you to change the whole construction of a sentence... and to write good algorithms for that is next to impossible.

 

[Verbose]

Interesting because "Attention" comes out as "Aufmerksamkeit" yet when putting "achtung" in it goes to "Attention"

That's because "Attention" is just what convention says you should use in English when adressing people with a warning.

"Achtung" translates directly rather as "Pay heed" or similar ("Listen up", or possibly "Take care"). Which is the conventional German choice for adressing people with a warning.

 

[Goa]

For a more complete listing of the possible meanings of the word Achtung see here: click

 

[Flak]

Conclusion: Babelfish sucks. Anyone got any better German translators out there?

http://dict.leo.org

This is the only site I use anymore. They are very, very good. Automatically recognizes if you are typing a German word or an English one.

 

[willemvanoranje]

The best one can do if he needs something translated is find someone who's a native speaker in that language.

 

[kalif]

http://dict.leo.org

This is the only site I use anymore. They are very, very good. Automatically recognizes if you are typing a German word or an English one.

I second that. Best translator Ive ever used.