What are your thoughts on google translate?

[Saholy]

Google translate now uses the Malagasy language! This is so awesome for us because the Malagasy words change in their spelling according to noun circumstantial, circumstantial/relative, passive voice, active voice, and imperative. If you know how to spell the word you're looking for in English, then we have a dictionary that will show you all the variations of the word. But most of the time you need to find a word in Malagasy and that is when it is difficult because the dictionary we have may only have it on one place. So if I am trying to look up the passive word, then it might not be there because they have placed it in the noun circumstantial place. But Google translate detects the meaning! So you do not have to spend that much time searching. I suppose the search was part of my language learning as well but sometimes if something takes too long you do not do it. I will give you an example of what I was talking about:

To Turn Ones Head:

Miherika, herika, iherehana, fiherehana, iherikerehana, fiherikerehana

[lushlala]

Honestly? I wouldn't rely solely on it because it's not always accurate. I'd happily use it for my own personal use, but for anything work related.

Is it just me or is there another thread about this?!

[booklover22]

I don't think that it's that good. I think that just because it's Google they didn't spend that much time trying to make it very accurate. They could have done better, but they didn't. And honestly it starts to get worse when translating if you are uising a more complicated language. I just think that it's not worth it to use it.

[clau21]

No! Google translator is terrible, those transaltions sometimes don't make any sense. It's impossible to get a good translation from Google, and even if you paid a lot of money for a translation software it will always need your interaction for the text to make perfect sense. I wouldn't recommend anyone to use Google as a translator, it's not reliable.

[zurcminister]

Google translate is a great help for non native speaker of a particular language or for someone in need of learning of a new language. Personally, I used it when I was conversing with a Russian client. And although we spoke different languages, we understood each other and closed the sale.

[missbookworm]

I believe Google Translate is a good tool to use for online translations. However, I don't think we should depend that much on their translation results as I find them not accurate enough. We could utilize it just for giving us an idea about what this sentence is about, but we should not rely everything on it.

[Spyllus]

It's pretty good if you need to translate a word, maybe if you are curious, or only need a loose translation of said word. However a LOT of meaning is lost in the translation and google translate doesn't tell you things like the definition of the word in your designated language, which would be much more effective.

[kurdapia]

Nothing can beat a real person doing the translation. Computers or software have limitations they could not translate the subtleties of a given instance or language. When you use translation services you sometimes see some weird phrases that do not make sense right? 

[aira]

Google translate can be useful at times. I use it when checking for Korean or Japanese words. Sometimes, to check if my spelling in Korean is correct, I use it to translate a word from Korean to English. If it gives me a word that is not in English, I know that I misspelled the word.

 

However, Google Translate is NOT always accurate. There are times when my friends would be sharing hot news about Korean stars dating. For example, the news on Dispatch about Lee Jongsuk and Park Shinhye caught "dating" at night. The source I had was in Korean, but when I copied the contents to Google Translate, some of the words I got are romanization of the Korean word. I could not understand the whole point so all I got was the gist. And I had to wait for news from Soompi or allkpop.

 

Also, sometimes, Google Translate from English to Tagalog (Filipino) is not accurate. I had experienced that a few times, though I cannot remember the words I searched for.

Edited October 9, 2015 by aira

[lushlala]

Like someone said, Google translate is better than nothing and is probably best for translating individual words as opposed to huge chunks of text. There's been quite a few times where it's let me down with its inaccuracies. I'd urge people to use it with extreme caution.

[Saoirse]

There are not that many resources for translating Irish, so I actually use Google translate all the time. It's not without it's faults, but coupled with an Irish/English dictionary and a little previous knowledge works well. The main thing is being able to properly evaluate your level with the language - if you are an extreme beginner, Google translate will probably lead you astray more often than not. If you are an at an intermediate level - you know lots of vocabulary and basic grammar, and just struggle with long walls of text - it's a really great tool to nudge you in the right direction. I can usually tell when a translation is off/wonky and not to trust it. At a certain point in your language learning you should reach a level of intuition in your target language.

I would never use it to write a dissertation or translate a tattoo, but to help understand a news article, why not?

[Spyllus]

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...

I'm with you on this point too. Also, its better for translating to your native tongue rather than a foreign language, since you know what the translated word means

[Rimzi]

I love that Google Translate exists. Since my Turkish is far from perfect, I can refer to it when I'm texting with my Turkish relatives.

[Wanda Kaishin]

Awesome tool. I use it more often than all my other translation sites combined. Of course it has limitations, but what site doesn't?

[宇崎ちゃん]

It's fine for a free translation tool, but I wouldn't use it as a serious learning tool.
While it's OK for Indo-European languages for the most of the time, I wouldn't use it for languages that fall outside this category.

Just try translating the word "funny" to Japanese: おかしいです (okashii desu)
It might mean "funny", but in the sense like "he's crazy/strange".
And this dictionary confirms it.

The more correct word would be 面白い (omoshiroi).
Google Translate might translate it to "interesting" because it's true, "omoshiroi" means both "interesting" and "funny".
But you will never learn that with Google Translate!

Not saying that dictionaries are better, because at the other hand, it gives you too much information.
Looking up "receipt" for example will give you a lot of different words that mean that, but out of all, only レシート (reshiito) is used in the real world Japanese shops.
And that's the big thing you will never learn with dictionaries.

[linguaholic]

It's fine for a free translation tool, but I wouldn't use it as a serious learning tool.
While it's OK for Indo-European languages for the most of the time, I wouldn't use it for languages that fall outside this category.

Just try translating the word "funny" to Japanese: おかしいです (okashii desu)
It might mean "funny", but in the sense like "he's crazy/strange".
And this dictionary confirms it.

The more correct word would be 面白い (omoshiroi).
Google Translate might translate it to "interesting" because it's true, "omoshiroi" means both "interesting" and "funny".
But you will never learn that with Google Translate!

Not saying that dictionaries are better, because at the other hand, it gives you too much information.
Looking up "receipt" for example will give you a lot of different words that mean that, but out of all, only レシート (reshiito) is used in the real world Japanese shops.
And that's the big thing you will never learn with dictionaries.

Interesting thoughts on this!

Google Translate is based on statistical machine translation, so in fact if you are going to translate a single word, Google Translate will give you the most likely translation for that word. But what does that mean? It simply means that it will actually give you the translation that is most likely (statistically!). The translations are based on parallel corpora, so if Google has 20 parallel documents in let's say English/German, it will analyse how a specific word has been translated in the other language. So if the word Schloss has been translated into Castle 5 times but only 4 times into 'key', then the most likely translation for Schloss will be 'Castle'. Of course Google works with millions of documents but the concept remains the same. What I just said is very very simplified, but I just wanted to give you guys some information how the translations are computed. The computation of translations for single words its pretty simple and pretty straightforward, but once more words get into play (translation of phrases and sentences), the computation will be much more difficult and much more complex.

[BonClay]

I feel like it's a good tool to have when you need something quick or don't have anything else. It might not always have the perfect translation, but it gets the job done. I like the fact that you can download language packs separately so you can still use google translate offline when on your phone or tablet. Another thing that is nice is how it listens for both languages or can be handwritten. You can even use it as a practice tool.