What do you think of Google Translate

[Elta]

I've been noticing it get better and better for a while. I am most impressed by how instead of trying to just translate it trys to get the sentiment across.



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

For example - the idiom above in Spanish doesn't contain the word Cloud, Lining, or Silver etc. But it is in fact a perfect translation as far as getting the meaning across.


Punch some idioms in, in other languages you speak and see if it is as good in other languages, I am interested to see what it comes up with.

 

[Ajidica]

And still, you get some oddities:
AIDS to Yiddish.
Yiddish translation to English.
[Defecate] Bricks.

I have yet to understand how they got that.

I don't rely on it for any serious translating, more often than not it translates it to literaly or other issues. Here I think it translated it right as it is a fairly common phrase.

 

[Elta]

I don't have spell check in Spanish, So I like to drop everything I've written and skim the English translation to make sure I didn't obviously spell something wrong.

 

[Onionsoilder]

I think Google Translate is good for a laugh.

"How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood."
English to Japanese then back to English:
"How much wood Chakkuchakkuchakku if you can throw a tree."

 

[Dachs]

Google Translate is probably one of the best efforts out there to do something decent with computational linguistics, tbh

which means it's still not that great compared to most human translators

 

[Lone Wolf]

Much better then babelfish.

 

[Agent327]

I think Google Translate is good for a laugh.

"How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood."
English to Japanese then back to English:
"How much wood Chakkuchakkuchakku if you can throw a tree."

That. Computers can´t translate period.

Google Translate is probably one of the best efforts out there to do something decent with computational linguistics, tbh

which means it's still not that great compared to most human translators

Ummm, yah. Mostly because errr computational linguistics has nothing to do with translating.

 

[Verbose]

I think it provides excellent material for making educated guesses about how languages you don't actually know fits together.

 

[Tee Kay]

It's actually very good for rough translations, provided you know a bit about the language. Say when you have a sentence or a paragraph and you know a few of the words but can't be bothered to look up the exact translations individually. You can run it through Google Translate and then can read through and correct the mistakes afterwards.

 

[classical_hero]

I've been noticing it get better and better for a while. I am most impressed by how instead of trying to just translate it trys to get the sentiment across.



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

For example - the idiom above in Spanish doesn't contain the word Cloud, Lining, or Silver etc. But it is in fact a perfect translation as far as getting the meaning across.


Punch some idioms in, in other languages you speak and see if it is as good in other languages, I am interested to see what it comes up with.

What happens when you retranslate it back into Spanish? Does the phrase change? Also what does you sentence actually say?

 

[sophie]

Meh, if you don't know anything about a language and want to get a sense of what someone is saying it's good.

(For example stalking Yared and his Swedish friends on facebook)

I wouldn't recommend it (nor any computer translator) for composition or spell/grammar checking though.

 

[Mise]

I don't know why people expect something to translate back and forth several times and still retain its meaning. That barely works in real life. You say something to one person, he paraphrases it, says it to a 3rd person, who paraphrases it and says it to a 4th and so on -- you're never, ever going to end up with the same meaning, let alone the same exact phrase, as you started with. So while it's funny to translate back and forth in translation software, it's hardly a good way of figuring out whether it works.

Anyway, the way Google Translate works is pretty interesting. It basically tries to find your phrase (or parts of the phrase) in transliterations of UN and EU official documents, books (via Google Books), articles in multilingual magazines, etc. So, for example, translating the opening sentence of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina works pretty well, because there is a well established transliteration of that sentence.

 

[Elta]

Meh, if you don't know anything about a language and want to get a sense of what someone is saying it's good.

(For example stalking Yared and his Swedish friends on facebook)

I wouldn't recommend it (nor any computer translator) for composition or spell/grammar checking though.

I agree on the first point, but on the spelling thing - I already Speak Spanish so I am able to skim for spelling pretty easy.

I don't know why people expect something to translate back and forth several times and still retain its meaning. That barely works in real life. You say something to one person, he paraphrases it, says it to a 3rd person, who paraphrases it and says it to a 4th and so on -- you're never, ever going to end up with the same meaning, let alone the same exact phrase, as you started with. So while it's funny to translate back and forth in translation software, it's hardly a good way of figuring out whether it works.

I agree

What happens when you retranslate it back into Spanish? Does the phrase change? Also what does you sentence actually say?

Word for word:
And they say there isn't bad that for good doesn't come.

Or in a more intelligible phrase: They say that without the bad there isn't any good.

But even then that doesn't really convey the meaning, it is lost in translation using both translations. They say every cloud has a silver lining however does convey the meaning in my opinion.


When I typed in "and they say every cloud has a silver lining" and translated it to Spanish I got the same answer: y dicen que no hay mal que por bien no venga

 

[sophie]

Word for word:
And they say there isn't bad that for good doesn't come.

Or in a more intelligible phrase: They say that without the bad there isn't any good.

But even then that doesn't really convey the meaning, it is lost in translation using both translations. They say every cloud has a silver lining however does convey the meaning in my opinion.


When I typed in "and they say every cloud has a silver lining" and translated it to Spanish I got the same answer: y dicen que no hay mal que por bien no venga

So it attempts to transliterate idioms into their closest foreign counterpart as well? Neato!

 

[Alassius]

http://translationparty.com/#6320763

 

[Huayna Capac357]

Much, much better than Babelfish, but still not very reliable. Good on a word or phrase by word or phrase basis though.

 

[warpus]

If only human languages were context-free

 

[Takhisis]

Google Translate is probably one of the best efforts out there to do something decent with computational linguistics, tbh

which means it's still not that great compared to most human translators

I hope so. I don't want to be left out of a job by freaking Google.

 

[warpus]

Don't worry, you probably need a neural net-based AI to translate human languages with high-enough accuracy. And nobody's going to design one of those anytime soon, at least until 2024

 

[Souron]

It's useful for translating foreign websites so you can read the menus. Body text is more flaky, but it's not like you need to read many foreign articles.