I recall a linguistics professor years ago telling the story of the supercomputer translator going from English to Russian and back again. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" came back as "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten." :)
No, it's not "reliable" in any absolute sense, but it is very useful once you have an adequate knowledge base in the languages you are translating to and from. For single words it is quick and lists synonyms/approximate equivalents in various forms. For short phrases it gets you in the ballpark with verb forms and tenses. But to lean on it unquestioningly would be linguistic suicide, you're right. Still, it's an invaluable tool for my current needs. I deleted all the widgets on the iGoogle page and added in multiple copies of the translator, each set to a different translating direction (Eng/Ital., Ital/Eng, Span/Ital, Ital/Span, Eng/Span, Span/Eng). With this setup I just open the page and can quickly cross reference words and phrases. Some translation directions definitely work better than others. Mark On Jul 11, 2010, at 12:51 AM, Lynn Fredricks wrote: > Google's translation isn't a tool I would completely rely on for learning a > language. It is really, really great though for getting the gist of a piece > of text when an accurate word-for-word translation isn't that necessary. > > Try doing a translation of pieces of text from English into another > language, then take that result and then try to re-translate it back into > English. The results are...sometimes interesting, disturbing - entertaining. _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
