Re: Google translator

"Afoklala" <afoklala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1efyehd6pce8x.1tvblbzpls1l4$.dlg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Op Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:37:24 -0400 schreef Tony Vella:

"Athel Cornish-Bowden" <athel_cb@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:6mokddFhjh2cU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Does anyone (preferably someone whose native language is not English) have
strong views about the quality of translations produced by Google
translate (http://translate.google.com/translate_t)?

A local friend of mine was recently playing around with the different
"translation machines" out there. What she was doing was reverse
translation (e.g. English to Spanish and then the resulting Spanish back to
English) and judging accuracy by how close the translated English came to
the original. She tells me that Google was the best of a bad lot.

Both my friend and I are stamp collectors (and swappers) and at times we
must rely on machine translations, lately Google. She did not have any
problems with some contact in Brazil and I got along fine with Romanian and
Dutch collectors. But, as you can guess, it's not exactly translating law
and medicine; it's translating silly stuff like:

Thank you very much for the stamps you sent me; they arrived this morning.
I shall be sending you some Canadian stamps next week - they were all issued
before 1950. ===
Hartelijk dank voor de
stempels die u stuurde me, ze is vanochtend gearriveerd. Ik zal het sturen
van een aantal Canadese postzegels van volgende week - ze werden alle
uitgegeven vóór 1950.

I'm Dutch, so I can say something about this last bit. It is
comprehensible, but not grammatically correct Dutch. It contains one
serious mistake, when it translates 'stamps' as 'stempels'. A 'stempel' is
not a stamp, but the ink thing that is stamped ON the stamp to show that it
has been used. Very odd is that it makes this mistake only once, the second
occurrence of 'stamps' is translated correctly!
Here's an attempt at back-translation:
Thank you very much for the ink-stamps send you me, she has arrived this
morning. I shall the sending of a number of Canadian stamps of next week -
they were all of them issued before 1950.

My opinion: useable for simple everyday common messages. But don't use it
for your international sales website.
--
Jan Willem from Odijk, Netherlands

Hello Jan
I shall never use Google in my sales websites for the simple reason that I am a fanatical collector - I always buy and never sell (as my wife reminds me at every opportunity).
Ik zal nooit gebruik maken van Google in mijn verkoop websites om de eenvoudige reden dat ik ben een fanatiek verzamelaar - Ik heb altijd kopen en verkopen nooit (zoals mijn vrouw doet me denken bij elke gelegenheid).

One must admit that for such silliness Google translation is more than good enough. The worst that can happen in my case is some misunderstanding as to who is sending what to whom and when. For more important stuff than this I for one would never recommend its use.
--
Tony Vella
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
http://www.amedialuz.ca/

.

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