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Linguaholic

Using google translator.


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Google translator is getting more and more advanced. I have used it many times. Sometimes there are some errors, but it has definitely improved over the years.

Definitely, Google Translator is way better than it used to be. However, I don't advise anyone to rely on it when doing translations from one language to another. Although it's good, it's nowhere near perfect and there are times when it either provides bad results or it creates a faulty/awkward translation. It's good for finding the meaning of the words you don't understand or even for how certain words are pronounced, but I wouldn't use it for anything else.

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Google Translate has definitely gotten better through the years, but I wouldn't rely on it. It's a great tool if you're trying to translate a single word or two, but not when you're trying to translate an entire article. It just.. doesn't work. Maybe in a few years, who knows, but definitely not now. Sure, it'll translates maybe most of the article nicely, but the rest are a mess and you just end up with more work because you have to correct them all. So yeah no, I wouldn't rely or recommend it at all. 

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for now I don't really think that google translate is doing good at translating the text with 100% success rates, I tested it many time and it didn't do really good :) because sometimes there is words that have many meanings, and it translate it to the wrong meaning so text wouldn't be perfect at the end ...

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  • 2 months later...

I have never done this, but it looks like good practice.  I think it would be really neat to be so learned in a language that I could correct a faulty translation.  I have never really done much more than a word or two on a search engine translator.  I try to go on sites dedicated to language translation for those.  Even that doesn't always work because of idioms.

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Google does good translation, however, you cannot completely rely on google translator. Most of the time the translation is word to word translation and the sentences do not make any sense. You can use Google translate to translate the text in your desired language, however, you will have do do manual correction of the translated text

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It does to seem to miss a couple beats when it comes to getting an accurate translation, but I guess that is to be expected on anything that comes from such a large company such as Google as they attempt to appeal to everyone.  If you look for smaller applications that are more focused on particular languages you are much more likely to find the sorts of translations that are perfect when it comes to all aspects of grammar and cultural norms;

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On 18/03/2016 at 2:55 AM, VinayaSpeaks said:

Google does good translation, however, you cannot completely rely on google translator. Most of the time the translation is word to word translation and the sentences do not make any sense. You can use Google translate to translate the text in your desired language, however, you will have do do manual correction of the translated text

i have noticed that but do you find that it's a time saver or isn't it worth while and it's better to just translate the text from scratch.

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I have used Google translator in the past, but I like to translate it back and forth a few times just to make sure that I am saying the right thing. Sometimes it will translate literally and not really the way a normal person would respond. I like to use it and then search language forums to see how the locals would say it. I think that works best. 

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3 hours ago, Lingua Franca said:

i have noticed that but do you find that it's a time saver or isn't it worth while and it's better to just translate the text from scratch.

If you want to translate few lines, couple of paragraphs, Google translation does help and it is a time saver. However,  if you are doing lots of translation, it is time consuming to correct the text translated by Google. Usually Google translation is word to word translation, there will always grammatical mistakes.

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I work professionally as a translator, and many of my colleagues and I constantly refer to http://www.linguee.com/ for translation help.  The beauty of the site resides in the fact that you can look up entire sentences that closely match the phrase you're seeking to translate.  Additionally, it offers you the source of where the translation was initially provided.

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I use google translator all the time, I have tried every translator out there and nothing compares to google's, probably because it involves some AI in its algoritm which allows it to learn. The possibility to carry it on my phone makes it even better. You should try the app on your phone, it has so many tools that the computer version doesn't and even a real-time voice translator which is great.

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I realized recently how inaccurate google translate is. I was translating a sentence to communicate with my sister in French and she was like there are so many errors in my statement. That was when I realized you cannot use it to learn a language or even communicate; maybe except in rare cases.

I wonder why the software is not as accurate as it should be. Though I do not know for certain if it applies to other languages.

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I've used google translator many times over the years, and like others, I can attest to the fact that it is improving in some languages.  Others, I feel it still fails to comprehend certain things.  It's pretty bad at Japanese, I can tell you that.  A friend of mine ror'd when I showed him some "translations" I was finding.

But nonetheless, I do still use it sometimes when I need to know how to construct a statement or am looking for a word I can't think of it.  It's faster than scanning my English to Japanese dictionary. 

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I mostly use google translator to understand web pages that holds information i need. For example foreign offices and information websites. Of course google translate is still a machine but if you use it to translate stuff into English it's quite useful.

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When I need to translate sentences into languages that I do not know I use http://webtranslation.paralink.com/translations.asp . It provides translations from 4 providers, Google translate included. I then translate back into English all the results and choose the best one. I sometimes even google the resulted sentence to see if anything matches.

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I occasionally check it for single words or very simple sentences when I'm not 100% certain of the meaning I have in my head, but I would never trust it to translate complete texts properly. Recently it's also been hijacked to say "inshallah" to pretty much anything, which was awkward.

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If I need to translate separate words I use this Finnish translator sanakirja.org that has a large vocabulary. Google translator is good for longer sentences but only from English to the language I want it to be and vice versa. It's pretty effective to be honest, even when people claim it's not that accurate and gives you pretty much false translations. I personally use it for Swedish essays and such and noticed it's really good.

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On 21/03/2016 at 0:43 AM, VinayaSpeaks said:

If you want to translate few lines, couple of paragraphs, Google translation does help and it is a time saver. However,  if you are doing lots of translation, it is time consuming to correct the text translated by Google. Usually Google translation is word to word translation, there will always grammatical mistakes.

I think that's exactly what is still holding google back. The fact that it can't translate large paragraphs correctly has saved a lot of jobs. I personally hope it never gets there.

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1 hour ago, Lingua Franca said:

I think that's exactly what is still holding google back. The fact that it can't translate large paragraphs correctly has saved a lot of jobs. I personally hope it never gets there.

You make a very interesting point. I have worked as a translator and been paid $4 per page. If Google did the perfect translation,  I would have never got that translation jobs.

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Google Translate is great for just one or two words. It is also great for finding synonyms. However, I wouldn't use it to translate a block of text simply because it won't make any sense afterwards. The algorithms in Google Translate are not designed to produce a translation that actually makes sense.

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