I rate Google Translate A+

[amethyst]

Have to say I have been pleasantly surprised with this. I've downloaded some rare books in Dutch and have been translating them to English. Now the important thing here is that there are 2 options when using the google translate site. One option is to paste text into a pane and the translation will then be displayed in another pane. The translator used for this method does not seem so good to me and is limited to 5000 words per pane but I think you can click "next" to display more if you have pasted more text. The other option is to upload a document (several types are supported) which is limited to a text size of about 30kb. It then translates and opens the result in a new web page. Now this latter translation is very, very good in fact I will rate it as exceptional keeping in mind that this is done by software and not actually a human spending time doing the translation. It's also quick. Don't know about other languages but for Dutch to English it's top notch. So , I convert epub books to text, split it into chunks of about 30kb and do the translation with google translate. Perfect and highly recommended. The Google Translate page: https://translate.google.com/

[Flash]

Have you tried reversing the translation? In other words, translate from English to Dutch, then translate the result back to English and compare it with the original English version.

[Makoto]

I haven't done that in a long time with an online translator, but I did try it just now with your reply...

Dutch: Heb je geprobeerd de vertaling om te draaien? Met andere woorden, vertaal van het Engels naar het Nederlands, vertaal het resultaat vervolgens terug naar het Engels en vergelijk het met de originele Engelse versie.

Back to English: Have you tried to reverse the translation? In other words, translate from English to Dutch, then translate the result back to English and compare it with the original English version.

Not bad, in this case. Especially considering I have indeed seen far worse results when doing this in online translators in the past.

[amethyst]

Note that I have distinguished between the 2 methods available. I first tried the copy/paste method which did not give a great result. I have also tried this method before when reading newspapers in other languages and this also seem to be the default being used. Uploading a document though seem to be handled differently (perhaps a more sophisticated translation engine is being used) because the results are excellent using this method. What is impressive, is that it is not mere translation of the words that one often see with these translation engines but the structuring of the sentences (syntax) is correct too. Works for me.

[step]

I haven't done that in a long time with an online translator, but I did try it just now with your reply...

Dutch: Heb je geprobeerd de vertaling om te draaien? Met andere woorden, vertaal van het Engels naar het Nederlands, vertaal het resultaat vervolgens terug naar het Engels en vergelijk het met de originele Engelse versie.

Back to English: Have you tried to reverse the translation? In other words, translate from English to Dutch, then translate the result back to English and compare it with the original English version.

Not bad, in this case. Especially considering I have indeed seen far worse results when doing this in online translators in the past.

Amazing but. For all I know, in going English to Dutch Google translator could have tagged the whole output sentence with the whole input sentence, then, in going Dutch to English it could use the whole input sentence as a tag and search for its knowledge base for a sentence that matches that tag. That would count as "translation smartness" in my book but a good knowledge base searching algorithm.

Perhaps you could try inserting several short words in the Dutch sentence - words that in Dutch don't modify the original English meaning - and feed that to Google Translate to see if the result still matches the original English sentence. Anyway, thanks for your first test.

[Makoto]

Unfortunately, I don't actually speak Dutch - I was just taking Flash's cue in having Google Translate convert his reply.

[mikewalsh]

@amethyst :-

I've used the copy/paste two-pane method for text a few times during the course of moderation duties (had it bookmarked for around 18 months or so) - we get a number of folks using Indian/Pakistani/Arabic/Indonesian over at BleepingComputer, and this method is good enough for figuring out what they're talking about. I will admit the translation isn't always that accurate...

I've never tried the 'Document' method before (hadn't even noticed the 'Document' button, TBH..!) I'll have to give that a go one of these days...

Mike.

[Grey]

Admittedly, Google has made some headway in recent years.
About five years ago, the translations were very funny. It was possible to laugh at the result for a long time
However, at the moment the text has become quite coherent. And even swearing sometimes translates well, or rather their closest equivalent is selected.

[amethyst]

There is also a translate function when using Google Docs. The advantage using this is that one can upload a document of any size. Unfortunately, I'm not able to check this out as my browser crashes everytime I try.

[amethyst]

Admittedly, Google has made some headway in recent years.
About five years ago, the translations were very funny. It was possible to laugh at the result for a long time
However, at the moment the text has become quite coherent. And even swearing sometimes translates well, or rather their closest equivalent is selected.

Yes, that's correct. That's why I'm so surprised with the recent results.

[amethyst]

@amethyst :-

I've used the copy/paste two-pane method for text a few times during the course of moderation duties (had it bookmarked for around 18 months or so) - we get a number of folks using Indian/Pakistani/Arabic/Indonesian over at BleepingComputer, and this method is good enough for figuring out what they're talking about. I will admit the translation isn't always that accurate...

I've never tried the 'Document' method before (hadn't even noticed the 'Document' button, TBH..!) I'll have to give that a go one of these days...

Mike.

The document option gives better results. I've read a complete book which was translated from Dutch to English and the translation was very good. I've also checked German to English which also looks good. Next I'll check my home language (Afrikaans). The translations may just be as good as the contributions of the translators that made it possible. It may also be that translations to English may generally be good as it's a universal language.

[Grey]

It may also be that translations to English may generally be good as it's a universal language.

Exactly. It is widespread, famous and not the most difficult of all.
And what about Google's translation of the legends of a tribe of some Lost Island, the language of which consists only of consonants (or vowels) sounds ?

[amethyst]

A common thing that happens in some translations to English is that the "it" meaning in English is translated as "he". I also see this happen quite often when some non-First Language English speakers (depending on their language) speak/write in English. Also some languages may have different phrases describing the same thing. For example: In English one may say "he is as sick as a dog" whilst in another language there may be another phrase for this. Now, obviously the translation from the foreign language to English may look strange or funny in this case because the phrase in the foreign language is not familiar to English speakers. So for idioms and such one may get some hilarious results (however, I actually find this entertaining and "colourful").

[Grey]

A common thing that happens in some translations to English is that the "it" meaning in English is translated as "he".

For me, the most difficult thing... that the ship is feminine, that is, "she". We have him male - "he".

And the articles "the - a" can not always be put correctly.

And why in British English "at school" means to study at school as a student, and "in school" means to be in a school building. In American English, the opposite is true. Or have I messed things up again ?

[amethyst]

And why in British English "at school" means to study at school as a student, and "in school" means to be in a school building. In American English, the opposite is true. Or have I messed things up again

In South Africa children studying at school are called "learners". Schools for school children are called primary school, high school, secondary school, academies or colleges (which are normally privately owned schools). People studying at tertiary level are called students.

[mikeslr]

...
And why in British English "at school" means to study at school as a student, and "in school" means to be in a school building. In American English, the opposite is true. Or have I messed things up again ?

The above may be true in some American dialects. In the New York area, "in school" and "at school" are interchangeable, with "in school" being more frequently used unless the subject is "away at boarding school or college".
AFAIK, in all American dialects, "in school" always means to be in a school building while "at school" means "no longer living at home". There's never any implication that anyone is actually studying. Or has a need to.
In a democracy, whether they're on the Right or the Left, the last thing Leaders want is a general population which can think for itself.

[Grey]

I remembered how this summer I drinking vodka talked about science and culture with a friend, a linguist.
He advised me to watch different versions of the Pawn Stars show on the History channel to understand the differences in the English language variants. Pawn Stars USA, Pawn Stars UK and Pawn Stars South Africa.
But I don't remember who's the best role model... maybe Chumlee ?

[amethyst]

A note. It seems the file size limit when using the document translation option is 10MB (which is huge if it's a text file). I have successfully translated complete books in one go. So, I don't know what happened last time when only about 30kb of the text had been translated using this option. The other less sophisticated "pane" option version allows for only 5000 words to be translated at a time. I guess what happened last time is that I used the "pane" option first and later on the document option which may have caused a glitch or bug in the system. I think if you use the documents option from starters it should work okay.

[r96chase]

Not gonna lie, Google Translate has come a long way indeed. I hope it might do something with Japanese in the near future...since I need help communicating with my friends from Japan. However, I'd say Spanish is fine. I could words from that somewhat.

[williams2]

English to Japanese:

eng2jap.jpg (123.08 KiB) Viewed 737 times

Japanese to English:

jap2eng.jpg (127.5 KiB) Viewed 737 times

https://www.deepl.com/translator

[amethyst]

Well, it's definitely true that translation from the other language to English seems much better than the other way round which is no surprise really. For me this is perfect as I only need the translation to English because I make audiobooks from the English translation. The best translation I've find so far with google translate is Dutch to English (with the documents option). German is also good although then you start to encounter the he, she, him, her, it issues. All in all pretty good overall though.

[amethyst]

So, I have found a way to overcome the size limit for translating a large text (.txt) file when using the "documents" option. The trick is to open the text file in your word processor and save the document as a .rtf file (just renaming the extension does not give the desired results because this will not fool google tanslate and it will reformat it). You can then save the file again as .txt after translation.

[ndujoe2]

impressive

[amethyst]

Another tip here. Always select the languages from and to be translated, from the list instead of letting google translate detect the language automatically (which is default). The reason for this is that the source language (to be translated from) may have a word which is spelt the same as another language but has a different meaning. For instance, the word "lag" in my home language means "laugh" in English. So, if I had to translate that word from my home language to English using the automatic detection setting, the result will probably be "lag" in English (google will probably detect the word as being English by default notwithstanding the fact that the rest of the source text is in the other language). The latter seems to be happening especially when translating large text in the "documents" mode.

[amethyst]

A note - Translating a whole document does not work for me with Palemoon anymore. Fewer document types are shown and the actual translation is just not happening. Luckily it seems like everything is still like old when using Firefox. I tried the very old Light browser and it worked 100% as suggested in the aforementioned posts.