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Linguaholic

Facebook translation tool


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So I have some spanish speaking friends on facebook and their is an option under their text that says "translation". Does anyone actually use this or no if it is completely reliable? 

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I have also noticed that translation tool on Facebook and I think it's a good move by the company because it is a socialization site that caters to people from anywhere in the world. I haven't tried the tool yet though because most of my friends speak the same language as I do.

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You must be careful with any sort of automatic machine translation. All this automated 'translators' do the best they can but, even their best can get you in a lot of trouble...!  If it is within the pages of Facebook... I don't think you are in terrible danger but...  if you are dealing with work-related text, I would, definitely, not rely on these translators.

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Have you used Google's translation service. Facebook translation is similar to Google translation. If you have used Google Translate,you will find facebook translation is just word to word translation that does not make sense sometimes.Having said that sometimes this feature becomes very helpful. It can helpyou understand what the post exactly, even though it may be grammatically incorrect.

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The translation tool on Facebook is powered by  Bing if I remember correctly. If you use it, sometimes there will be some funny results, since Bing's translator isn't any good at all. 

It also offered automated translations which were also pretty mediocre at best, since the problem was that  it detected certain languages and it often detected the wrong language, or it translated it poorly.

Anyways, don't use Facebook Translate. It's pretty crappy and doesn't do a lot. If you want, just get someone on the forums here to translate it, or maybe put it into Google Translate if you want a rough idea of what they're saying. 

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I will try not to repeat stuff that has been said here before.

Question: Is it OK to use automatic translators such as Google or the one built into Facebook?

Answer: We must consider a couple of factors to give an intelligent answer:

(1) The degree of complexity of the text you wish to translate: If you want something like "Hello, my name is Cesar", there should not be a problem letting these processes take care of the translation for you. If, however, your text is along the lines of "I wish you would have told me that before, I could have had the total re-calculated"... hmm... no! Not good for a automated process.

(2) I have seen many replies/posts which mention the fact that "... it's OK to let them translate your text; you just have to check it afterwards..." . This is fine if you know both languages (and this would make me wonder why you'd go to a translator to begin with). What if you have no clue about the language you are translating to...?

(3) Context: extremely important issue. A hypothetical answer (in English) like: "Yes, I am" may be translated into Spanish as: "Sí, yo soy" OR "Sí, yo estoy". The difference might have an impact on the rest of the text.

Someone mentioned "linguee.com". I use this site quite a bit and it eliminates, pretty much, all issues outlined above. It is good.

Buena suerte...!

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  • 11 months later...

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