ergophobe - 2:40 am on Dec 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'm not even sure what forum that should go in.... but since I'm bilingual and try out translation tools from time to time, might as well leave it here.

My general experience is that the improvement in the last five years is dramatic. It used to be a fun game to put something into a translator, then take the translated text and translate that back. So English -> French -> English.

Anything complex would come out gibberish and sometimes hilarious. I just took something and went English -> Bulgarian in Babelfish and then Bulgarian -> English in Google Translate and it came out virtually identical.

So a quick test you can use is this. Let's say you have four main languages. English, Spanish, German, Japanese. Take some text and go

English -> Spanish -> German -> English. If it looks good at the end, then the intermediate steps are probably at least okay.