What are your thoughts on google translate?

[Cutler4Life]

I know google translate is used many times in classroom settings and the professor (fluent speaking), knows that they used the translation site. It is not always correct, I am wondering why.

I personally love that facebook now has a translate feature under posts because many of my friends live in foreign lands and speak non english languages sometimes. It is nice to be able to keep up with them.

Do you think google translate is a good online option for translation?

[seoclone]

No Free translation site or application are good, but that's my opinion. I've tested translation sites such as Google Translate with languages I know to find the accuracy of the translation and although there might be the rare occasion when the translation is correct, more often than not, there are huge errors which makes the translation hard to understand.

The only worthy translation sites that are worthy of being used are those you need to pay for. They maintain a higher standard when it comes to translation.

[Judhie]

I think it's because of the different sentence structures from different languages. Specially those words that doesn't have a direct translation but is just being described into works when translated to other languages. So the software translator gets confused and choose to just continue the entire translation even if it already has a wrong grammar. Whenever I need to translate some languages and wanted them to be accurate, I try to just translate the entire paragraph via sentence to sentence or sometimes even word by word. That way I get to see whenever the phrases still makes sense or not.

[Michael P.]

Google Translate is ok. It really depends on what you are going to use it for.  :confused: If you are browsing through the internet and find a page in a different language and you just would like to get an overview of that very same page in another language, then google translate is great. if you are translating very easy sentences from let's say german to english or german to french, then google Translate is a very fast and quite reliable way to get things donse. However, if you would like to get an accurate translation for different language pairs (more "exotic" languages and combination of languages that are not etymologically related/connected) then you get in trouble real quick  the results in those cases are often really bad and the translation worthless.

I reckon Google translate is not bad and getting better and better...but for a proper translation you will always have to improve on the translation yourself and if you are translating exotic language combinations, Google Translate is very inaccurate (for good reasons). :ninja:

[LinguaFranka]

I've used it for individual words or very short sentences but anything more and I find it tends to lose the plot. For instance, if you are looking for 'colloquial' spoken,local translations then it doesn't do too well.

The best example would be to copy and paste an article to translate to another language and the re-translate that back to your original. You'll find it to be virtually unreadable.

[Fabrice]

I'm using both Google translate and Urban Dictionary (for slang words) and I think it works pretty well for me. Like someone mentioned before, I can't imagine using it for to translate the whole text. It is interesting that we got supercomputers which can predict weather on the world or do nuclear test simulations, but we still don't have a universal translator. It only proves how complicated the problem is:)

[lookforuu]

I guess google usually translates text word by word, languages similar or close to each other work somehow good in google translation, but for languages in quite a big distance google is a little funny, hehe. E.g. it's easy to translate between English and German, but not easy to translate between English and Chinese, in this case you may just use google as some reference, and guess the exact meaning by yourself, hehe.

[Guest Ames]

I believe google translate is better than nothing. Often I can get the intent of a sentence or phrase if not the direct translation. But I don't often try to use it to learn a phrase I intend to use unless I pass it by a native speaker first. Google just garbles sentence structure and grammar horribly too often.

[socialistkoala]

I´m really not sure why google has not figured out a way to improve their translation feature. They have so many resources to use but they dont seem to care about the translate function at all. I think it has been the same for the last 5 years or so.

They could figure out some algorithm, which recognizes patterns in languages and sorts after relevance (based on the content/context). They could just start out with like 5 of the top languages at first and expand later on.

[lookforuu]

Maybe they don't care about it that much, since it's still the main automatic translator people use online, therefore there's no force for them to improve or develop, coz anyway people are using it.

[Medza]

It's surprisingly good. When I first came to England, about 10 years ago,  my family purchased a standalone translation program on a CD and it was terrible, you could input strings of text into it but it would just come out as garbage. But the technology has moved on significantly over the years and it is now strongly usable. It's not perfect but you should be able to make out a good 80% without any major problems.

[angelicanicole]

I happen to enjoy the Google translation, I used it often and I haven't noticed any issues. Of course, I don't speak any other language so I wouldn't know if it was correct or not. Usually, I will try to get a translation from English to Spanish since I am in the midst of learning Spanish. I'm glad that I now know that it can have some errors. Next time I use it, I will be sure to ask my mother if its correct, since she speaks Spanish fluently.

[H_Bachman]

It's a way to generally understand what is being said in a foreign language, and I suppose that is the ultimate goal of translation.  It will not, however, cut it if you need a professional-sounding translation or any translation in which it is not painfully evident that you used a translation program.  The incorrect grammar, sentence structure, and mistranslated words will be noticed above and beyond the content of the piece.

[BWL]

I totally agree with most of you, I would never use Google Translate to translate complex sentences from English to Japanese, for example. To test this out this is the exact sentence that I had typed using my laptop into the Google translate web page. It was for English to Japanese and this monstrosity was what I got:

English: I would like to help you.

Japanese: 私はあなたを助けるためにしたいと思います。

This is the first and last time I use Google Translate for English to Japanese!

[Forgetparis2003]

It's not perfect, but I think it comes in handy when you need to quickly figure out how to say something. Also, if you have some skills/knowledge of that language, you can tweak the translation and make it work. So all in all, I'm all for it!

[Jeroen030]

Google Translate works rather good if you just need a quick translation of single words or at most a short sentence.

The problem with translation site or programs is that they still see each word as a separate word, so sometimes translations are garbage because the translation software doesn't "see" the connection between some of the words.

Google Translate is also terrible at proverbs, but I've noticed that it's been improving the last couple of months.

[cefmac]

It can be useful, but only for short phrases or individual words - I wouldn't dare trust it to translate entire sentences for me. We were always berated in school if we used Google Translate, and for good reason - one time, my friend tried to cheat in French by using Google to translate "I used to like to play in the sand pit", and when we translated the French back into English, it came back as "I liked to play in the vertical sand drainage"!  :bored:

[TomekaB]

As a professional translator I love Google Translate. It is a tool that can be used to cut down on translation time. The key is understanding the target language and its nuances. What I like about Google Translate is that it compares your text with text from millions of hits on the internet. It also provides you with a method for checking synonyms and updating your translation.

I also use the Google Translate web app to translate webpages and content that I need to see in the target language for comparison purposes. It is a great tool that I love and will continue to use.

Good Luck!

TomekaB

[pcgamer]

I have Google Translator installed as an extension in my Google Chrome. I agree that the translations are not perfect - not by a long shot. Some of the translations are downright hilarious. But it's extremely useful when you need to translate a foreign-language website to the language you understand.

I  can translate websites like Gametsu (a Japanese gaming media site) to English and comprehend everything which I couldn't have done without Google Translator.

[NatureSun]

No online translation software can be as good as a living breathing translator. At the end of the day they're only machines or Artificial Intelligence.

Sure, they might be able to translate the gist of the language in a manner which might be understandable. But it's next to impossible for them to translate it 100% accurately, including grammar, slang etc.

It really isn't possible. Atleast not yet.

[lingolino]

On a word level Google translate is pretty decent. On a sentence level? Forget about it....

It can be a help to get words from a sentence translated into another language but don't expect Google translate to get the grammar right.

It is just too hard for statistical machine translation to grasp the context as well as the grammar of a certain text. There are just too many options...

[mleocasas]

All of the automated online translation applications are horrible for anything more than a single word. Even when they get the syntax right, they just aren't able to interpret the qualitative aspect of a sentence. We have entire schools of human beings who argue over the right way to preserve the context and tone of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Cervantes, etc. Machines aren't quite at a place yet where they can make those kind of abstract judgements about the meaning of words. 

[smo11]

As stated in previous responses Google translate is not absolutely perfect, but it can come in handy. I was traveling abroad in China staying with a friends family who did not speak any English, nor I any Cantonese. After a week of feeble hand gestures to communicate one of the siblings had a bright idea to try Google Translate. Instant success, the flood gates were open for communication. now it wasn't perfect but it was way better than pointing and grunting.

[nonsiccus]

It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish with it. I think it typically will give you a pretty decent 1:1 translation of a word or phrase, but will sometimes start garbling things a little bit depending on what language you're translating from.

I've had occasions where someone will translate from Chinese, and while it's readable, you can definitely tell that it was run through a translator, or that something was very different about it.

Otherwise, it's a very useful tool.

[Topcho]

I am not a fan. I guess there is still much work to be done at least in the Bulgarian version of Google Translate, because the results are  often hideous  :frozen: I use it only when I really have no other choice, like when I needed to check one Chinese cross stitch site.