What are your thoughts on google translate?

[Canadien]

I find Google Translate is useful for translating certain words or extremely short phrases/sentences. Anything beyond that and it begins to jumble the words and lose any sort of correct grammatical form. There's no doubt, though, that it has certainly improved tremendously since it's initial inception, but it's still got a long way to go. When I'm working on long assignments or essays in French, I'll usually stick in a whole sentence occasionally, and translate it. After that I'll go through and correct the grammar and switch the words around if need be, but it's helpful for me as it adds in the accents and circumflex' that I do not have on my keyboard. Otherwise I'd have to go through the laborious process of copying and pasting the special characters every single time I wrote a sentence.

[AgentD22]

Oh no, it might be one of the better ones, but we have a long way to go before we can use without fear. Only use it to translate single words that you are not familiar with.

[2times]

When i use google translate to help with spanish homework or classwork, rarely does it give me the wrong answer. but sometimes yes it is wrong. my professor hates when his students use it even to check on a single word because he says it is a different dialect than the norm.  :amazed:

[Enlil]

Google translate can be a very powerful tool, you just have to know what you're doing and be able to critically examine the results given as well as use other tools. I find that it usually works best with one or two words. It can also be a great help if you recognize most or all of the words in a sentence but can't quite figure out what precisely it's trying to say. A Google translation combined with your own knowledge of the context can frequently break the case, or at least that's been my own experience.

[simply934]

Google translate can come in handy at times but it is definitely not a dependable translation site. Yes it may translate the words correctly but it usually comes out incorrect when translating a sentence or paragraph. Many languages have a different sentence structure which is what Google Translate lacks in translating correctly. Overall it does a pretty good job in translating a few simple words.

[foodietr]

Google Translate is just average I would say. It does not link the words with the adjectives or the translate term and most likely for any translation you need to look up the meaning for sure. This is because of the program which is developed to just translate sentences word by word. Changes will not be applicable and no conjunction is done.

[Azurix]

I agree with most who have posted here. I think google translate just tends to take and translate words very literally. Because of this, I think google translate is excellent! But not if you're looking for correct grammar usage with the language.

[FosterTXT]

Like I have mentioned before in similar threads, I try to stay away from Google translate. I have noticed that it isn't very accurate at translating some Spanish words. I'll stick with a Spanish to English dictionary for now as Spanish is the language that I am most interested in at the moment.

[snowfairy]

I would say Google Translate is fine but not to the point that we analyze the text translated as it is. I guess the translate option's goal is to just give the readers an idea of what the sentences or phrases is trying to say. Google translate might take the foreign words literally that's why there are times that when it is translated, it doesn't make sense at all. So if we are to use this tool, I guess we just need to analyze it properly.

[babyleans]

I think google translate should just be used to get a rough idea of what the sentence is about. I think they should put a visible notice saying that. It has tremendously helped me in the past while i was beginning to learn spanish.

[Shearah]

I really dislike google translation. It hardly ever translates the whole sentences rightly and sometimes not even words.

[aceofnoobs]

I personally prefer Word Reference to Google Translate because it gives more concrete examples of how the word is used. When translating single words, it might be harder to use Google Translate because it lacks context. I think it is getting better, however, but whole sentences may still come out as awkward chunks that are comprehensible as a whole.

[Onfroi]

I think Google Translator have been getting worst as time goes on, due to the "improve translation" feature. Sometimes what you write you don't want word for word translation or that's just going to sound ridiculous, but you want a meaning, and that's were Google Translator fails at.

[DancingLady]

I think it is useful if you are really stuck and need a hand translating something because you need to know what it means, but it doesn't seem to get the grammar quite right all the time, so it isn't a great tool for learning.

[eulenspiegel]

I think Google translate is a great tool for a first pass. It gives a rough translation you can go through and fix up. It's not much use after that. I find it often helps with finding words that are on the tip of my tounge.

The very early AI translators tried to use rules and were hopeless. Google is instead running off a huge database of translations it has found all over the web. This makes it a lot better. The other nice thing for programmers is that it has an API so it can be built into other sites or apps.

There's a free database at www.linguee.de which I find very helpful between German and English when I'm truly stuck.

[Languagetat]

Some of the posts in this thread have been very fascinating. They make me think of the power of online databases to process linguistic information. I have also noticed that Google Translate has improved its algorithms for translating texts based on user input and all the books they have processed. If those algorithms keep improving we may get to a point where for quick translating tasks we may really rely on Google Translate to do the first translation, only to proofread it and make some finer adjustments ourselves.

However, I also agree with all the posters that doubt that machine translation will replace the nuance and complexity of a human translation in the short to mid term future.

[dilandilan]

sometimes it is good to work on it...... but when you put it a long text it makes many mistakes

[thewakeupcall]

I don't really like using google translate, but if I'm in need of a speedy and rough translation of something, I'll use it sometimes. The problem is, the translation may be wrong in some parts, and I don't want to look like a fool. Also,

although Google Translate offers many translations, some of them are better than others. Say that it translates one sentence all the way correctly, but another sentence in a different language, incorrectly. You can't just trust one translation to know if Google Translate is correct.

[Androu1]

I think it's a decent tool for certain languages. It's not really a tool for a real translator but for those that just don't know the original language of a text. For a translator, I would say something like WordReference would be a much better tool!

[athena02]

As stated by others, Google Translate is a good tool for online translations jobs. Of course it won't be perfect, and it will in fact have a lot of flaws. But if you are familiar with both languages, proofreading the translated text can be rather easy.

[zabina12]

I think Google Translate is the most popular translation tool in the web but I do not think that it is one of the best. It might be a good tool for translating word per word but not for translating sentences or phrases. It will not give the exact meaning of what should be translated so, not that good for translating sentences.

[Victor Leigh]

Google Translate is useful but it is definitely not the panacea for all language problems. On Facebook, there is always that little button to translate. My friends include people who write in Thai and Arabic, so I have to use that little button quite often. And I often get a good laugh at the translations.

[xHysteria]

I remember using Google Translate for swapping Vietnamese over to English, and I'd say it's about 90% effecientcy. Mainly because it translates word by word and then it begins to work out the structures of the sentence, but sometimes it's wrong even.

I really like the features where it speaks the word for us, so we can learn the word, but sometimes it's not that clear so I can't really learn anything.

[SBNinjah]

I utilized Google Translate quite a lot when I was in highschool learning French. It's just great when you need to decipher straightforward sentences like "I enjoy reading." or only single words. In the event that it is a very elaborate sentence, it won't bode well at all most of the times. I do believe that it's come to great lengths in the past years and it's gradually improving, and to be completely honest I trust that I will become quite a dependable tool in the not-so-distant future.

[languagelearner]

using google translate can get you in a whole bunch of trouble. my friend one time wanted to write a nice message to one of our Spanish foreign exchange students, "You are hot". The translator used a different kind of "hot" implying something other than her just being attractive. It was a mess.