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Google language translator | ||
Tags: Google | Translation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
 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 9 of 29 19 June 2009 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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Personally I think that we will see a clear improvement in Goggle's translations over the next few years, and with simple texts it is even possible that they will be as good as anything delivered by a human learner with less than advanced fluency. But the kind of knowledge you need to make perfect translations is not just linguistical, and even though Google does 'know' about just about anything in the digital universe it will be difficult to integrate this knowledge in the translator.
I have noticed that there is a feature at least with some languages where you get alternative translation with single words, - maybe one possible improvement of he translator could be that it gave several possible solutions in when it is in doubt. Edited by Iversen on 22 June 2009 at 3:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6086 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 10 of 29 19 June 2009 at 12:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd love a translation tool that parsed the sentence, and labelled the various parts.
E.g. Given the simple sentence, SP: Es bueno que haya mucha gente aquí, would produce, Es: Verb(ser - Present) - it Bueno: Adjective - Good Que - Conjunction - that Haya - Verb (haber - Subjunctive) - there are Mucha - Adjective (mucho - Fem.) - a lot Gente - Noun (Fem.Singular) - people I'm sure this is possible, and it would make a great learning tool for any language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ego.penso Newbie Israel Joined 5590 days ago 9 posts - 10 votes | Message 11 of 29 19 June 2009 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
You're underestimating the power of machine by a lot. The machine by no means will be able to express itself like a thinking human. But when it comes to translating, it's down to regularities that machines can easily handle. We tend to think so greatly of languages, but really, it's only a casual tool. It's no god-like power, and machine today can do much more in other fields. Again, the only reason we're seeing inaccurate translation is because the research is not half the way through. As we speak, Google engineers are working out all kinds of problems. If you were familiar with the "babelfish" vision, you would know that we're heading to a time were digital communications will be made in one's own language, and automatically translated to the language of the correspondent. If you don't believe me, I guess you'll just have to wait and see. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6207 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 12 of 29 19 June 2009 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Google is better at some languages than others. It doesn't do Turkish-English well, but I still sometimes use it for that for difficult sentences, as I play around with appropriate translations. It does Romance languages well, Slavic fairly well and I am sometimes impressed by the size of its vocabulary.
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| delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5810 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German | Message 13 of 29 19 June 2009 at 11:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yeah, today I was on CNN.com and they were doing Farsi to English and the translations had loads of mistakes in longer sentences.
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| Ashiro Groupie United Kingdom learnxlanguage.com/ Joined 5737 days ago 89 posts - 101 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 29 20 June 2009 at 12:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm sorry but to think that Google Translator is anything but a guide is silly.
Its woefully innacurate even with languages you'd expect to be simple - English <-> Spanish. As I've learnt more Spanish I've realised how poor it really is. It can't understand a LOT of verb conjugations and makes terrible mistakes with pronouns too. As a VERY obvious example, it translates the Spanish: "tengo" to the English: "I". Tengo means - "I have". So the mistake is quite significant and its certainly not a system you can rely on as a first source learning aid. Its good for checking and getting rough ideas about sentences, etc. I even did a post a few weeks back suggesting that translators were dangerous. Incidentally: I have tried Babelfish (Yahoo translator) a little and it seems more accurate - though still not perfect. ("tengo" = "I have" on BF) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6207 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 15 of 29 20 June 2009 at 1:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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I only use it as a guide - even with the simpler languages, obvious errors crop up and with more remote ones like Turkish, it is very obvious. I may give Babelfish a try.
I think a real breakthrough with machine translation like this will occur when it can adequately handle languages like Turkish, Hungarian or Finnish. That is probably some way off. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6060 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 16 of 29 20 June 2009 at 11:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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I used translate.google.com to spell check a vocab list. I typed in a large list of words and their definitions from a textbook, (about 700) and then I pasted the entire list into google translate. I then went back and checked manually only those entries where the google translation didn't approximately match the English original.
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