Free translation wesites

[the_raven_group]

Is it just me or do you guys think free transalation websites are fantastic. I regualrly use them to find items on foreign e-bay websites. I recently purchased an iraqi police and Jersualem army medal from the French version of e-bay for a total of nine euros. I sold the police medal for $45 US dollars and the Jersualem medal is currently up to $95 Us dollars and they are still bidding. Excellent site!

[liowkc]

Free translation sites are good for quick and dirty translations of key terms rather for intellectual discourse. You can find them on Google and Alta Vista websites.

[Antster]

Yes, I love these.
When attempting to translate long passages of Japanese mish-mash, it really helps, considering how rusty my japanese is. But sometimes they are really unreliable and spout a lot of nonsense.

[hwang]

Geee...But sometimes, they don't provide an accurate translation. I can read chinese and I can tell you the English -> Mandarin translation is really terrible. You don't really understand what is being translated unless you have to make your own guess. In the end, I ended up reading back the English version. Lol

[the_raven_group]

I've had the same expereince with the German to English translation. Often it translates the words but fails to understand the meaning, the end result being a load of nonesence!

Still it is a good aid and better than sitting with a English to German dictionary!

[life31]

Dont know it there are any such sites for translation. But there is google translate or translator which I oftenly use while surfing foreing language sites.

It can translate any content or even the whole site if you specify the url. You can try out that.

[the_raven_group]

I have seen the Google translation icon appear when I have carried out internet searches but I have never actually used it before. How exactly does it work? and is it relaible?

Also sometimes when I view internationl sellers on e-bay a message comes up saying something along the lines that e-bay has provided the translation but that they are not accountable if the translation is incorrect.

[liowkc]

Use such translation tools for a quick and dirty understanding of foreign terms, not for literary discourse or deep meanings. They are just the high-tech version of travel gadgets that allow translation from one language to another for simple and common phrases.

[Antster]

Yeah, for the odd one or two words, it's absolutely fine.
It's just those longer passages (With perhaps more difficult words?) which makes the translators go a bit funny.
They also get tenses wrong a lot, with me reading present and past in the same sentence.

[life31]

As far as Google translate is concernt its fine. It does allow you to translate phrase or paragraphs and even the whole site. Most of the times it does give proper results but then if there are any spelling mistakes then it does give a totally different meaning

Here's the link to google tranlate [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]


Lol just for a try here is the link of translation of this page to portuguese [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

again into french [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[the_raven_group]

Apparently there is a lot of money to be made from translating documents from their native language into English. There are numerous websites across the internet dedicated to this. Kind of makes me wish I had taken a foreign language more seriously at school.

[liowkc]

That is the general problem of the US and UK populaton - being monolingual. But I honestly cannot blame you all for laziness as English is practically the lingua franca

Let the Chinese take over the world and the English speaking world will be scrambling to learn Mandarin.

[the_raven_group]

I'm not sure the Chinese rise to superpower status will push English aside. English is for one the langauge in which the internet was created, it is the language of aviation and just possibly the language of democracy so i think it will survive and continue to dominate for many many years to come!