Re: Translations

[Scott McDowell]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2002, at 02:43 AM, Colter Reed wrote:

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On 3/26/02 19:24, "RJ Auburn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I think it would be good to send the original message. If the translation
does not make sense the recipient can then use other resources to try and
translate it if needed. I would suggest a preference option to control this
setting.

I still don't see how sending both the translated and the original text will
benefit.

Because half of the time the translations are so bad they don't make any sense in the new language.

There is a way to control whether what you send is translated or not. If
you want to send the original message, don't tell Fire to translate what
you're saying. If you want to send a translated message, tell Fire to
translate what you send. Simple as that.

Not so simple. I don't know whether Fire will do a good translation of my sentence until it's already sent it off, by this point it's too late.

It is, however, nice to know that people are using the language translation
capabilities.

I'm not actually using it anymore. My spanish is good enough to know that half of my messages were being garbled into new meanings. My peruvian friends were getting all weirded out by my poor translations. They were better off reading my english that trying to figure out what I had been trying to say in spanish.

I still think the language translation is a Mac-first feature.

It's a shame, because it's such a useful feature, and my spanish (and their english) skills are pretty limited. If all your after is a neat toy feature to brag about, you got it (and it's really cool). On the other hand, if you want a useful tool that will be applied by most people in real life, you've got a lot of quirks* work out. For now, I'm back to using babelfish so I can edit mistakes before they're sent out.

------Scott
*here's a good example: how to use two languages in one message (like Gerardo did with Rico Sauve...hehe)
ie: "Tengo que practicar my trumpet. We'll talk next week amigo. Adios."