Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3708 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes Speaks: French
| Message 1 of 6 07 September 2014 at 11:19pm | IP Logged |
I've used google translate, and babel translate, and both to be honest aren't all that great. They get it about 99% right, but don't seem to allow that many words have varying meanings depending on context, like que, both translate it as that by default and there doesn't seem to be a way to change it to what, which it can also mean, especailly when you're asking a question. I would like to practice working on things like grammar, I'm still getting the hang of in French. Is there some way I can practice without someone to speak to? I don't want to ask 4 million questions when I could just run it through a program of some sort. Is there anything out there that is good enough for my purposes?
Edited by Tyrion101 on 07 September 2014 at 11:20pm
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Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5394 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes
| Message 2 of 6 08 September 2014 at 12:08am | IP Logged |
A reliable computational translator is still a unsolved problem for the informaticians. I doubt very much, that we will get near your 99% precision the next decade. Only humans can judge whether what you say in a foreign language is correct and idiomatic.
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5115 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 3 of 6 08 September 2014 at 12:30am | IP Logged |
Depending on the language, the Wordreference forums often provide great feedback, as long as you observe the forum rules. For example, one word or expression per post, no Youtube links and no commercial links.
For a basic grammar check, you can install LanguageTool or use the online version. It's not perfect, but it catches most basic grammar errors.
You can even add your own rules using the user-friendly Rule Editor.
And finally, you can search parallel text repositories for real-life usage examples:
Linguee
MyMemory
Glosbe
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rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5031 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin
| Message 4 of 6 08 September 2014 at 11:52am | IP Logged |
If you want to have your written work checked by a native speaker you can signup for an account at http://lang-8.com/ and people with give you suggestions and corrections, of course you should do the same for others.
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6392 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 5 of 6 08 September 2014 at 3:53pm | IP Logged |
In many cases simply googling helps, especially with quotation marks. Also, with such a popular language, chances are others have already asked the question before.
And wiktionary has declension tables for most languages.
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Masone Newbie United States Joined 3675 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Studies: French
| Message 6 of 6 15 September 2014 at 9:35am | IP Logged |
I'm able to change it in Google by clicking on the English word. It does seem to revert
back to the default once you put the word in there again, not sure how to change it to a
different one by default. But at least you can see the other translations. I learn all my
words in the context of a song, so it helps to see all the other meanings of the word on
Google. The default one is not always the one I need.
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