Why is Google Translate so bad at Spanish?

[A0130]

How exactly does Google Translate work so that it "knows" what to say in the first place? And why is it almost always wrong?

[linguaholic]

I have to admit that I do not know about how google translate works exactly, however there is already a discussion going on about google translate here:

http://linguaholic.com/english-translations/what-are-your-thoughts-on-google-translate

Could you please ask this question there again? Thanks a lot!

[btatro]

In my experience, Google translate is pretty awful at trying to translate ANY language 

I have tested it most with French and Spanish and it has almost every time come up short. It is not authentic nor conversational language... but, how could it be, really? Words are not always translated meaning for meaning and word for word between languages so it would take a fairly sophisticated program to produce that.

[SpiralArchitect]

Google translate is not so good for a lot of languages. Spanish is not really an exception.

[Alfonso]

I actually think Google Translate is a very useful tool, with Spanish you can pretty much understand the meaning of what you input. It's not prefect but its continuously improving. I would not copy paste the translations tough.

[LauraM]

Google Translate has shortcomings as others have described on this thread.  But at the same time, I think it is helpful in some ways.  I mainly use it when reading news stories or in doing preliminary research where getting the gist of what's being said is what's most important. 

Google Translate fails in capturing the subtle nuances of vocabulary and so sometimes the results can be a bit strange, possibly even goofy, and certainly way off the mark at times. 

So we just have to use it with caution and be mindful of the limitations. 

[AdamDavis14]

It is ok if you want to know a few words. Like if you needed to know what the colour green was (it's verde by the way). I find though if you put long sentences into it, it can work a couple of times but then it will just mess up. I find that it doesn't do the verbs right sometimes, like the past tense or present tense for example. It still is very useful.

[tulosai]

It is ok if you want to know a few words. Like if you needed to know what the colour green was (it's verde by the way). I find though if you put long sentences into it, it can work a couple of times but then it will just mess up. I find that it doesn't do the verbs right sometimes, like the past tense or present tense for example. It still is very useful.

This is pretty much my feeling too.  For short sentences with basic meanings it is fine, and for individual words it is great.  If something is in a totally foreign language to you and you have no idea and just want the 'gist' it is also fine.  But for anything else, it's not great.

[PSLoveCharli]

Google translate has never worked for me! It is not an accurate translation app. Get rid of it and download iTranslate on iOS. I love this app, and it offers many languages. Not to mention the Spanish translation is 100% accurate. Give it a try.

[writeletters]

It's a machine which knows the definitions of words but not the actual meaning. Obviously Spanish speakers have created phrases and different ways of saying things which when literally translated are incorrect (that's what google does, it literally translates).

[ssonicblue]

What Writeletters said.

Google Translate should really be called "Google Interlanguage Dictionary." It's not really a live translator and it's terrible at things like dialects, parlance, and nuance in any language. The instances where it does manage to catch secondary meanings or contextual implications are usually added to the system manually by Google's engineers. In the future, we may eventually see an actual universal translator... but GTranslate isn't there yet.

[linguaholic]

If you are interested on how Google Translate works exactly, have a look at this video.

When it comes to machine translations, there are two big "systems: statistical machine translation and rule-based machine translation. Google Translated is based on "statistical machine translation".