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Reading this forum via google translation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5285 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 1 of 17 06 September 2013 at 1:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Hey peoples, Peoples Republic of China, people of the Kingdom of Bhutan, rappers MC's, professors,
janitors, & magicians, I've just decided (yesterday/ayer/gisteren/hier) that I would attempt to read every post on this forum (during lunch breaks at work/trabajo/werk/travail etc. I generally loathe FB, forums, online games etc mainly because I don't like wasting my time with (in my opinion/à mon avis) needless mind-wasting crap when I could be learning a language, or procrastinating over learning a language by reading other (à l'avis des autres personnes) mindless garbage. So my question is this... Would it be 'good' in your (citizens of the world including the depths of the deepest lakes & beyond into outer space) opinion to.... wait for it... are you waiting? Better be! To read this entire forum in French (current language of study) via google translations? My initial extensive (please set aside a few hours to make your way through this) list of pro's & con's reads like this: Pro's: Exposure/reinforcement to previously studied (in limited contexts) language New vocab learned Con's: Exposure/reinforcement of incorrect translations Any thoughts? El Stevenberg Ahem cough cough, as if u didn't know it was me Rey de España 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| PeteP Newbie United States Joined 4846 days ago 27 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Romanian | Message 2 of 17 06 September 2013 at 3:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Google translate more often than not gives comically poor translations.
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| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5675 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 3 of 17 06 September 2013 at 4:32am | IP Logged | ||
People should never ever make categorical statements!!! Seriously, Google Translate does amazingly well, especially when translating between major languages, and especially to/from English. Yes, occasionally it will be wrong, even comical, but nevertheless, usually quite helpful. To give more insight into Google Translate, comments should be made with reference to specific language pairs and even the translation direction. I can attest that GT is very good from Dutch into English and reasonable from English into Dutch (as far as I can tell but I am not native-Dutch). I would say that the best way to use GT is from your target language into your native language. Then you can tell if the translation makes sense, and you can see the correct target language. I use it all the time. That being said, I'm not sure how effective reading all of HTLAL will be. Pretty tedious, at least. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tsopivo Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4280 days ago 258 posts - 411 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Esperanto | Message 4 of 17 06 September 2013 at 5:35am | IP Logged | ||
Sounds like a great plan if you are studying GT EN to FR French. On the other hand, if you are studying FR French, CA French or any other French dialect, I would not recommend it ;-) (and I say this after having tried to translate your post to French via GT to see what it would look like) Edited by Tsopivo on 06 September 2013 at 6:01pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5285 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 5 of 17 06 September 2013 at 7:50am | IP Logged | ||
You're simply making a statement. I'm aware the translations can be poor hence why I'm asking the question 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6512 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 6 of 17 06 September 2013 at 10:07am | IP Logged | ||
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The formulation "more often than not" allows for the possibility that certain Google translations are perfectly OK, but the longer they are the higher the risk is that something comical will occur. Personally I use GT in the direction from a weak to a strong language to make bilingual texts, which saves me a lot of dictionary look-ups without tempting me to learn specific words and formulations in a language where I can't spot the errors. I know the thing well enough not to trust it in the opposite direction. It is not really a question of language pairs because all translations with one possible exception go through English, but translations to and from small languages and the only 'dead' language Latin are especially errorprone because of small samples and the lack of a grammatical 'motor.
For instance English -> Irish completely disregards the rule that the verb should be in the initial position (with just conjunctions and particles allowed before it). I once had to throw a large collection of scientific articles about extremely interesting themes away because it turned out to consist of machine translations - and the word order was the clue that immeditately gave it away, but heaven knows what other errors it could have implanted in me if I had read enough of the stuff. Edited by Iversen on 07 September 2013 at 5:35am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3908 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 7 of 17 06 September 2013 at 10:37am | IP Logged | ||
The key here is major languages, which includes French. I personally wouldn't read a forum like this one in French with Google Translate to get language exposure, but then I'm a stickler for native sounding text. I won't even read books translated into French, since I remember being a teenager in Sweden and seeing clunky, un-natural sounding, subtitles and translations (even books). If you're less bothered with this kind of thing, though, why not? I'd definitely make sure only to try this in languages for which Google Translate does a decent job. Google Translate does not do Swedish, for example, remotely well, and when translating from Swedish into English the end result is often a garbled incomprehensible mess. I've experienced this first hand all too often as a freelance translator and copyeditor/proofreader. Clients will come to you with a text that they claim has been translated and now needs checking (1/4 the fee of a translation), but the subject and object are frequently mixed up, sentences lack both subject and predicate, there are words missing (with Swedish, Google Translate often skips words), there are no definite articles, and even if you are a native speaker you have no idea what is being said. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5369 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 8 of 17 06 September 2013 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it's an excellent idea, but that doesn't necessarily mean it would be the most
efficient use of your time. I by the way, always use GT to check my writing before posting on Lang-8, to check I haven't made too many howlers. It's funny though, how over a couple of years we've changed from thinking GT was flawed but almost miraculous, to starting to find it a bit disappointing. Edited by schoenewaelder on 06 September 2013 at 3:35pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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