Bing or Google

[NATASHA]

I have a friend that comes to visit me from Romania and I use bing translator or google but she seems to often not understand what I am writing. Have any of you tried to use either of these and which one do you think is the best one to use for accuracy?

[Chris_A]

I think both of them are really bad. Such translation engines translate the words, but cannot really keep sentence structure together. The result is a garbled mess that native speakers will surely not understand. These are good only to quickly translate certain words that you don`t know, but you should fit the words together to create an understandable sentence.

[czarina84]

From what I have seen you shouldn't use any search engine translators.  They are terrible.  Sometimes they get it right, but more often than not, they don't.  Have you looking in the Language Study Apps or Online Language Learning sections of this forum?

 

[NATASHA]

I will take another look because I do feel bad that I cannot communicate properly and it is frustrating writing everything down and getting confusion back. Wouldn't it be nice to know how to speak any language by the touch of a button!

[JasleenKaur]

1 hour ago, NATASHA said:

I will take another look because I do feel bad that I cannot communicate properly and it is frustrating writing everything down and getting confusion back. Wouldn't it be nice to know how to speak any language by the touch of a button!

Nice, i am also using translator for communicate with some friends they are from Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Russia. But i don't feel bad i really like that translator helps me to talk independently. 

[czarina84]

3 hours ago, NATASHA said:

I will take another look because I do feel bad that I cannot communicate properly and it is frustrating writing everything down and getting confusion back. Wouldn't it be nice to know how to speak any language by the touch of a button!

One day, technology may reach that point.  Hopefully, it will be in our lifetime.

[JackStonewall]

Now I don't know your friend, and I don't claim to, but are you sure she even speaks Romanian at a native level herself? Because, frankly, I've seen (and sometimes used) Google Translate, and no matter how broken it is or how terrible it sounds, it's still perfectly understandable. For a native speaker, if nothing else.

As for whether you should use Bing or Google, aren't all these free translation services pretty much the same? And by "pretty much" I mean identical. I don't think it matters much which one you use. If you want to make yourself understood when you're communcating with her, and she's having all this trouble understanding the machine translation, I suggest you research other translation services that cost a bit of money. Most are cheap and offer decent translations (better than machine translations in any case), and it's certainly a lot better than trying to say something to your friend when half the conversation is "what do you mean?", or maybe it's not.

I'm rambling.

[agentzero]

12 minutes ago, JackStonewall said:

Now I don't know your friend, and I don't claim to, but are you sure she even speaks Romanian at a native level herself? Because, frankly, I've seen (and sometimes used) Google Translate, and no matter how broken it is or how terrible it sounds, it's still perfectly understandable. For a native speaker, if nothing else.

Seriously, if somebody came and started translating from English (or any other language for that matter) to Serbian using Google translate (haven't tried the Bing one so I can't say about that one), I'm pretty sure I'd be able to understand the gist of it. Even though Google translate isn't a perfect translator on a sentence level, I've never had issues when translating just a word. And if it creates the sentence based off of word by word translations, I don't think it would be that hard to understand. Of course, Serbian is different from Romanian. 

[Lingua Franca]

Google translator is not that good, I used them to translate some text a short time ago, but fortunately understood the language I was translating too. I spent just as much time correcting the errors as if I had translated it myself. Unfortunately there are no easy solutions, your friend might get a general understanding of what you are saying but not more then that.

 

[shadejb]

Google is actually improving itself gradually. It is crowd-sourced, and everyone contribute either by translating new phrases or correcting old ones. I am a contributor, and I must say for a lesser known language like mine (Vietnamese), it got a lot of complex phrases right. Some are ridiculous of course, but that's what I am there for. Bing on the other hand seems to translate word by word, and that does not end well for my language.

[Heda]

Non of them is very accurate, I'd say..:/

[capuchin]

I wouldn't rely on any kind of machine translation. I've tried google translate a few times and the only thing it did was to make me laugh. I didn't even know bing had a translation service.

[aleshc]

Google is Ok for basic translations or individual words, but if the phrase is more complicated, it usually messes it up. Although sometimes, I'm impressed at how good the translation can be. But that's probably just because a user added the phrase and translated it properly. And that's a good thing, because if more people are willing to input the correct translations, or google somehow upgrades their service, it could potentially be really useful in the future.

[NATASHA]

I don't know she cannot speak a word of English and google and bing seem to get us communicating but not so much so that she can fully understand me. I remember a device my dad had to travel with and it translated into many languages but I cant find one of those anywhere. It sometimes seems like the older stuff worked better than what we have today.

[rz3300]

I would think that both services offer pretty much the same expertise when it comes to translations, and that is not that much.  You are probably better off using a legitimate translating site, but if those are going to cost you something then I can see why you would want to avoid them, but I am pretty sure that there are some free ones out there.  I guess the only real way to figure it out is by trial and error and see which ones give you the best results.

[Trellum]

Google is good enough, but it comes with limitations, because well that is how it is with free stuff    But if I had to choose between Bing and Google i'd choose Google.   Sometimes you can get some really good translation, specially with short phrases, but with longer sentences or whole paragraphs it can be so tricky.  A good level of common sense is required. 

[NATASHA]

I don't know if it is accurate but perhaps it could be the way we input the sentence that might make it complicated  for someone to understand. I know she is definitely foreign and some of the sentences were understood but others seemed to make her look puzzled. I think now that it could be the sentence phrasing because we don't talk the same way that they do

[darkchild]

I would suggest you pick words while trying to translate. I realized people who speak foreign languages would rather you take it slow with them; one word at a time. Too many long and complicated sentences can confuse the translate itself; though there is nothing better like having a native speaker interpret for you.

[MyNameIsFermin]

I have found that google translator works wonders when its Spanish to English or vice-versa but not so much for Spanish-Portuguese which are the main languages I translate to. I wouldn't really use the translator for a language I don't know anything at all but if you're going to use it anyways, I suggest to translate always from English and not your native language.

[Rooks57]

I didn't know that Bing had a translator.  I've only used Google Translator.  As bad as it is, I don't understand why she would have trouble with the translation if you matched the languages up unless she speaks a specific dialect.  My mom uses Google Translate for business and no matter how butchered the translations are, they still translate for people speaking three different language to work together with only the occasional mishap.  You could try simplifying you sentences for the translator so minimize how awful it is but other than that I've only used G.T.  

[宇崎ちゃん]

Automatic translation tools are never accurate and never will be.

It works OK with sentences like "This is a tree", but it will always fail with idioms, poems, normal longer sentences and features the target language lacks.

[MichaelJacob]

I think Google is a lot better, I think it's a lot more accurate. One thing that I thought was weird when using Bing was they didn't have a specific word I was looking to translate from Spanish to English, and google had it really quick, and was accurate.  

[VinayaSpeaks]

For translation service, if you have used Bing, you will find Google as good as Bing, or as bad as Bing. If you you use Google Translate, you will find Bing translate as good as Google or as bad as Google. These translation service are for reference purpose only, you cannot rely on the accuracy. These translators will translate word by word, they do not care about syntax and grammar. If you translate "I eat Pizza," from English to other language don't be surprised when you get "Pizza eats me" as the result.

[rz3300]

On 8/25/2016 at 2:11 AM, Rooks57 said:

I didn't know that Bing had a translator.  I've only used Google Translator.  As bad as it is, I don't understand why she would have trouble with the translation if you matched the languages up unless she speaks a specific dialect.  My mom uses Google Translate for business and no matter how butchered the translations are, they still translate for people speaking three different language to work together with only the occasional mishap.

Yeah I agree there.  It is pretty bad, but there are ways to have it just be good enough to work, which is really all that matters most of the time.  I also was unaware that Bing even had a translator before not too long ago, but I tried it a little bit and it is really nothing to write home about.  I am sure they are getting better, though, and maybe in a few years we will have these automatic translators...I guess we shall see.  Thanks for sharing.

[polyglutton]

Translation apps/websites are generally only effective for simple sentences. If you're looking to translate something a bit more abstract, it's better to look up translations to entire phrases and putting it all together yourself.