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Google language translator | ||
Tags: Google | Translation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5810 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German | Message 1 of 29 18 June 2009 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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How is the accuracy of Google language translator. I have never used it, but today I took a look at it and saw that they added more languages. Is it actually a good dictionary?
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 29 18 June 2009 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Bad, but it is still useful in two situations: 1) if you don't know the language you are dealing with, because then even a hint that is only partly true is better than no hint, 2) if you know the foreign language fairly well so that you can spot the worst errors. Sometimes it leaves out a negation, sometimes it can't decide on what is the subject and what is object in a sentence, sometimes it leaves out a word or a phrase (maybe because it doesn't like to admit it doesn't know it - which makes it seem almost human), and if you use apostrophes in a word you can thoroughly confuse the poor little thing.
That being said, it is amazing that Google can make machine translations even at this mediocre level, and if I started to learn Chinese or Hungarian or Arabic right now I have a feeling that it would become an expert translation master before me. Edited by Iversen on 18 June 2009 at 10:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5773 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 4 of 29 18 June 2009 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is better from some languages than others.
For example it's virtually perfect from Swedish to Danish and very good for Swedish to German. Because the languages are similar so it's harder to mix up the grammar and the structure of the sentence is not so different. But it's rubbish for Russian or Japanese which are the only other languages I tried. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ego.penso Newbie Israel Joined 5590 days ago 9 posts - 10 votes | Message 5 of 29 18 June 2009 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | ||
Bad compared to a human translator, obviously. But among the other machine translators out there, it's by far the best. Machine translation is still a relatively new field. The particular Google algorithm is said to be able to improve it's ability as it goes. The machine processes parallel texts of two languages and learns to equate grammar points. Even though it's far from being perfect, it's an excellent tool for people who know how to use it. The mistakes you find in it are falling out gradually, and my estimate is that 2 years from now, it will reach perfect results. All too bad for the human translators among us. How do you make good use of it? If you wan't to know how to formulate a correct sentence, you have the machine translate it from your language, and you take the sentence to a search engine. You add in quotes, and you see how many results you get. If it's above, let's say 5000 results, you naturally conclude that 5000 people are not wrong, and you get to understand what's the correct form of the sentence. If it doesn't seem convincing, you make your own adjustments, until you get it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6307 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 29 19 June 2009 at 7:11am | IP Logged | ||
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It's very bad. It's good for looking up words or expressions or checking things but it's
no good for real translation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6307 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 29 19 June 2009 at 7:14am | IP Logged | ||
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but that's just not possible. Language translation is not as simple as equating grammar points. The reason why humans out perform machine translation is because the human actually understands and comprehends what they are translating. Machine translation will always have a cold non-human feel to it. The only way it will ever perform perfectly is if it has human-level artificial intelligence and that won't happen for many years to come Edited by zerothinking on 22 June 2009 at 2:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5810 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German | Message 8 of 29 19 June 2009 at 8:09am | IP Logged | ||
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It doesn't work half bad when it comes to single words, but when it comes to phrases, it just screws things up from what I have seen from playing with it for a bit of time.
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