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Linguaholic

When A Website Is In A Language That You Don't Understand


Lin

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You know...I'm really knew to these things. I remember some time ago, while surfing the net with internet explorer, that I came upon a site that had a particular theme that related to my research. Problem was...I couldn't read the words. :frozen:My God! It took my son to tell me to use google chrome browser instead. Did you know that it comes with a built-in translator?

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Although I'm not very keen on machine translation, Google Chrome's built-in web page translator is a very useful tool. However, I wouldn't use it in every kind of site. I find it useful, for instance, in shopping websites, as a way to grasp some basic information as you can find on websites you understand, especially when it comes to find the right buttons for "Add to Cart" and "Checkout".  :tongue:

However, if one's researching information or just reading a longer text on the web, the machine shows its limitations, and the result, while it may give you a glimpse of what is being said, isn't as trustworthy.

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I try to avoid that kind of web sites as much as possible to be honest, but when I do find one that is written in another language, then I use google translate.  I'm not big fan of google translate, because sometimes the translations you get make matters worst. That's why I use Firefox and I rarely get search results showing sites in different languages.

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I usually try to find if it has the English translation somewhere on the website. Otherwise, I most likely leave it alone because I don't want to spend time on something I don't really understand, especially in the language in which I don't understand. I use Safari browser, it doesn't offer translation to website languages.

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Although I'm not very keen on machine translation, Google Chrome's built-in web page translator is a very useful tool. However, I wouldn't use it in every kind of site. I find it useful, for instance, in shopping websites, as a way to grasp some basic information as you can find on websites you understand, especially when it comes to find the right buttons for "Add to Cart" and "Checkout".  :tongue:

However, if one's researching information or just reading a longer text on the web, the machine shows its limitations, and the result, while it may give you a glimpse of what is being said, isn't as trustworthy.

I agree with you. Google translator is automated or machine translation. Thus, it may only serve to give you  a synopsis/idea of what the website is saying, but it can't give you the complete information. Examining it myself, I find that there are certain words that are translated as synonyms to the word intended in my native tongue and thus the synonym gives a slightly different idea from the intended truth.  :sad:That's why nothing beats human translation.  :grin:

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  • 2 months later...

Google Translate can be good on websites that allow it to translate. The downside to these is that there are few to none pages that can be translated properly. So if you do not know the language in the web-page, good luck to you as you may never understand anything written in it.

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I knew about Google's translator, it pops up everytime I visit a site in a foreign language. I seldom use it though because I don't like to read translated things, they look like a mess. I'd rather surf blind and find my way to the page I want.

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Chrome has a feature where in you can click to translate the website to your desired language. And that's what I do when I don't understand the site I land on. I love Google for that.

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