How accurate are the online translators?

[cole]

Does anyone have an opinion on the accuracy of the various online translators? I just used Babel Fish to translate several sentences. How far is Rome? came back as, "Fin dove e Roma?"

Are you armed? (as in do you have a weapon?) Came back as," Siete munito?"

Are these translations the best way to convey the intended message?

Any opinions/insights would be greatly appreciated.

Ciao,
Cole

[marcom]

Dear Cole,
Automatic translators have still not achieved a very good level of accuracy.
If they had language teaching would be obsolete!

Use them sparingly, it is maybe best to use an online dictionary and then try to fill the blanks with common sense.

Hope I was helpful

[greywater]

You have to be careful with them but IMHO Google's translations are the most accurate.

[alxmrphi]

Online translators are terrible, Google's is the best, as it uses sentences within contexts and chooses things it thinks are correct, it's amazing more accurate than the others, but even that probably makes it only 30% correct.

Think about:
"I read a book" -

Is this the past tense /red/ or is it the present tense /ri:d/
Not even Google could figure this out..

If you type in "I read a book" - it comes back with "Ho letto un libro", good ok, but if you add 'every week' therefore changing it to present tense (for habitual actions) - it translates:

I read a book every week - Ho letto un libro ogni settimana.

And there we go, wrong.
Automatic translators are the most useless thing that you can find on the net, they can translate nouns well, as there are only limited meanings, but when you get to verbs / adjectives, it can go very wrong.


Let's take a fairly idiomatic use of Italian (Che fine hai fatto?) which means "What happened to you? / Where have you been?" etc etc, and put it into Google...

"What did you order?"

Completely wrong.
I've just found some other disasterous mistakes..

"Look forward" - "Attendo con ansia"
"Have your cake" - "Avere la botte piena" (Google)
"Have your cake" - "Abbia vostra torta" (Babelfish)

Google has got the idiomatic expression "Have your cake and eat it" listen to be recognised and translated accordingly, which it does with "Avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca" - another idiomatic expression in Italian it matches up with, but if you take out "and eat it" and you want the other meaning, it cuts off the ending and translates it as "To have a full barrel" which couldn't be a more stupid translation.

Babelfish has missed out the "la" to form the possesive, it has assumed we're speaking to more than one person because of 'vostra', when would you ever say that sentence to more than one person??? It logically needs to be 'tua' - and Italian doesn't use "Avere" the same way we use "Have" - there is a preference for either prendere or, here 'Mangiare' (to eat) - so it's another bad translation.

I am shocked that people think they can translate text automatically on the internet!! A funny thing to do is to translate something into another language, and translate it back again and see what it looks like:

Let's give that a try, if it's a good translation it will be the same both times.

I don't know what I am supposed to do. -> Non so che cosa dovrei fare -> I don't know what I should do (different meaning)
He said he wouldn't have missed it for the world ->
Ha detto che non avrebbe perso per il mondo -> He said he would not miss for the world (different again)

[njmanton]

Using an online translator to convert a sentence is like taking each word and looking them up separately in a dictionary. You lose all context of the sentence, though I would have thought with modern computing power this could be better - search technology is moving this way with partitioning search results depending on different meanings of a search term.
Of course, translating something like 'fare' is always going to be problematic.

I read a book every week - Ho letto un libro ogni settimana.

And there we go, wrong.

Not that it invalidates your argument in any way, but is this necessarily wrong? It works in English in both present (habitual) and past tense:
'I read a book every week' (habitual) and '[last month] I read a book every week' (past)

[alxmrphi]

Not that it invalidates your argument in any way, but is this necessarily wrong?

Yes, if you mean that it is in the present tense, of course you can view it like "I read (/red/) a book every week (past)" in which the Italian is correct.
But if you meant (like I did) that it is in the present tense (to show a habitual action) then yes it is wrong.

What I was illustrating is that it's impossible to know in this example whether you are talking about the present or the past, and if you mean the present, the automatic translator will assume the past (as shown by the Google example)

I can understand what you were pointing out, but I wasn't saying that the example couldn't be considered right if you meant the past, as the spellings are exactly the same it's difficult to illustrate without being able to see it, and awkward to use IPA as I never know if anyone knows what it means.

You mention 'fare' - perfect example, you've given me an idea, let's try Italian's tricky "far fare" construction:

Gliela faccio mangiare (I'll have him eat it) comes out as
I eat it to him

If I put a space and put 'mangiare' on a different line we get I do it to him eat

Another tricky one is faccio comprare una mela a mia sorella which in English means "I'll have my sister buy an apple" - comes out as
I buy an apple for my sister which is the wrong way around.

So yeah totally agree.
Online translators = poo

[/b][/quote]