Google Translate - worth adding to a website?

[Simsi]

Hi guys

I added Google Translate to my web pages but noticed from the stats that those people who use it rarely follow through.

I had a Chinee guy tell me it didn't make any sense - so it had me wondering, is it a poor translator in general? Is it worth keeping?

Or is it more likely my content (which is global-generic product reviews) is not appealing to them bearing in mind many "English" readers follow through to new pages/outbound destinations.

Cheers,

Simsi

[tedster]

Machine translation is pretty rough at this point in time. I wouldn't add it to my sites, I can tell you that. It's not that Google has a particularly poor translator -- it's that all of them are still pretty poor.

[Haecceity]

I agree completely. Machine translations are fine for getting a rough idea of what a page (or better, a short phrase or single word) is about, but the results are generally dreadful.

Even for translations like English to French, it's common for the machines to think that a noun (eg. a present) is a verb (to present), making complete nonsense of the translation. For translations like Chinese to English and vice versa, the results are pure gibberish. It's fun to take an english phrase and to translate it to Chinese and back again. For example:

Is it worth adding Google translation to a site?

becomes

It is worth providing Google to translate the stand?

Now, honestly, if you didn't already know what that sentence was about would you be able to guess? It baffles me that a machine translation doesn't know that English questions are more likely to start with "Is it..." than "It is...".

[Simsi]

lol. Okay - methinks its time to remove it :D Thanks chaps.