Where can I find a good online language translator?
I occasionally communicate via e-mail, text messaging and forums with people in other countries and want a resource to translate things quickly so I can better understand some of what is posted. Any suggestions?
- Reg
Despite the fact that the Internet was launched and fostered in the English language, today you can find resources posted in every language on the planet.
Gone are the days that English was the required language in order to communicate with the online community. Everything from social networking sites, forums, instant messaging to online games will put you in contact with folks that don't necessarily speak English.
Having the ability to say hello in a number of languages or to decipher an e-mail or website that is in a foreign language is becoming more common.
There are many free websites that can do the trick and most of them look the same, but the results can be quite varied.
As with any automated translation process, the quality of the translation will always be less accurate then having a human translator. In fact, it can be downright wrong, so I would never recommend using automated translators if you're working on an important business transaction or legal document.
The best description was posted at one of the sites: They allow you to grasp the general intent of the original text, not to produce a polished translation.
One of my long-standing favorites for translating words or small groups of words is Babel Fish from the long forgotten search engine AltaVista (http://babelfish.altavista.com).
It can translate English to Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish and vice versa (and it will use the character set for that language, even the Asian dialects).
It can translate words and sentences (up to about 150 words at a time) but oddly enough, it works best when the text you translate uses proper grammar! Slang, misspelled words, poorly placed punctuation and complex or lengthy sentences can all cause translations to be incorrect.
Once the translated text appears, simply copy and paste it and viola, you are semi-multilingual.
Babel Fish can also attempt to translate an entire foreign language website, but remember, it will give you the general intent of the original text and so much of it will make no sense.
For instance, I tested various translators with the EPA's Spanish version of their website. The opening sentence of the welcome paragraph was translated to say this:
Independently from our cultural patrimony, all we benefitted from a clean and healthful medio.ambiente.
Not only did it misspell a word (benefited) but it was unable to translate medio.ambiente to environment which is what the entire website was all about.
You can expect this same level of accuracy when you translate English sentences into any other language; much is lost in translation and you can end up sounding like a dork!
Another site that seems to be slightly more accurate on website translations but no more accurate for words and sentences is www.freetranslation.com (free translators are on the far right). It also offers a number of professional human-based translation services for anyone that needs to rely on an accurate translation.
The best tools (even BabelFish) only promise about 85% accuracy, and Ken's example shows just how far 85% falls short. BabelFish itself is based on a project called Systran, don by the US Air Force in the 1960's to eavesdrop on Soviet communications, and there has been surprisingly little advance since then. The major difference is that the work that required a mainframe computer or super computer 40 years ago now can be done on a laptop PC.
Ultimately, the value of automatic translation is to take content in a language you don't know, and render a rough approximation in a similar language you do know, but in the process, you'll lose most of the subtleties, where the patterns of thought between languages don't match. You can do OK for basic comprehension of translating into English from something like German (which has the same linguistic roots as English) or French (which has significant quantities of shared vocabulary). Going the other way, from English to another language is far less productive, as is translations of "far away" languages such as Russian, or Japanese.
The idea of automatic translation with near-perfect accuracy is in the realm of science fiction, right up there with all the other science fiction things you see in Star Trek, such as talking computers, warp drive, particle transporters, and tri-corders that tell you everything that you want to know.
http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en
another excellent software can be found here:
http://www.online-translator.com/
It has been developed by a Russian company PROMT and they made tremendous progress in last few years...
http://www.e-promt.com/en/about/profile/team.php
HTH