machine translators

[luton]

Anyone use any machine translators
other than these?

world.altavista.com
freestranslation.com
tranexp.com
reverso.net
Worldlingo
Systran

Comments? Reviews?

[bill]

These machine translators are all fine tools that can help you get the gist of a site. I would be extremely wary of relying on them for business though. Although the level of quality has risen over the years it seems to me that very little progress has been made recently. The free on-line translators are not examples of the latest and greatest technology available.

If you need something translated for business purposes then a human translator is still essential.

[luton]

Right, I agree. I'm not talking necessarily about converting
FROM English, but converting something (like an email,
website, etc.) TO English... just to understand what's going on in the non-English speaking world.

(Is it "non-English Speaking", "non English-Speaking" or
"non-English-Speaking"?)

I have my own opinions about which ones I think do a better job, but I was curious if anyone has found a machine tool - free or not - that works better (in their opinion) than these?

[vitaplease]

Worldlingo is a good tip. Contains machine translation for languages such as Dutch that the others do not contain.

Do not forget Google translation.

Euroglot is a software package I like for word to word translation.

[consili]

An interesting way to test machine translations is to do the following translation to a target language:

"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"

Then take the translation and translate it back to english.

There are interesting results.

[luton]

"The spirit is arranged but the meat is weak"

Sounds like an English menu.

[daroz]

For a good laugh I recommend translating song lyrics. Personally "American Pie" to Italian and back was good for a belly-roll. :)

[01Uruguay]

Try.
www.translate.ru
translation2.paralink.com

[sem4u]

I use world.altavista.com for finding the English for somethings that I don't understand, often in German.

It works pretty well but there are always errors with using a computer for translating text.

[luton]

I think it's pretty well established that machine translators are
not very reliable, and can even be so bad they're funny.

But since I only speak English, they've opened up a whole
new world for me. I get to see what's happening on the
"other" 80% of the internet. (Or 70% or 90%, depending on whose
numbers you believe.)

Would I use Reverso.com to translate an important document into
a foreign language? No thanks. But I've found some of the
machine translators to be remarkably good at translating
websites into MY native language. (Well, except for Japanese.
Japanese IMHO "defies" translation.)

Anyone remember this episode of "NewsRadio"?

Mr. James: "The original title of this book was 'Jimmy James, Capitalist Lion Tamer' but I see now that it's... 'Jimmy James, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler'... you know what it is... I had the book translated into Japanese then back again into English. Macho Business Donkey Wrestler... well there you go... it's got kind of a ring to it don't it? Anyway, I wanted to read from chapter three... which is the story of my first rise to financial prominence... 'I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street... many days no business come to my hut... my hut... but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo... dung. ...Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans... and pants to match. The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey.'"

(Later in the Q&A)

Question: "Mr. James, what did you mean when you wrote 'bad clown making like super American car racers, I would make them sweat, War War'?"

Mr. James: "Well, you know... it's LIKE when a clown is making like a car... racer... it's sorta... like... the FCC. The CLOWN... the clown is like the FCC... and I was opposed to the FCC at the time, right? So it was like I was declaring War. WARRRR!"

Question: "So then did the 'American yum yum clown monkey' also represent the FCC?"

Mr. James: "Yeah, it did. Thanks a LOT!"

Question: "What did you mean when you said, 'Feel my skills, donkey donkey donkey, donkey donkey'?"

Mr. James: *Sigh*