Google Blogoscoped

Forum

Google Translation error

Karl Philipp [PersonRank 1]

Sunday, March 18, 2007
17 years ago7,351 views

In the Online Translation (i was trying to find some words for emotions)if you type in "shy, grief, sorrow" and translate from english to spanish it gives the words "arrojar, pena, dolor" now type that in the box and translate "arrojar" from spanish to english it now gives "to throw" if you continue next is
"para lanzar"
"in order to send"
"para enviar"
"in order to send"
*end*

I asked some spanish friends, arrojar is throw...and if you type "shy" alone it gives timido (the correct answer) just reporting a problem.
This ranks only slightly annoying for me, but it should be fixed...

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

You should only really enter single words or complete, grammatically correct sentences if you want a half-decent translation. Online translators are never great at translating nonsensical sentences or lists of words as they have no context to work with.

And translating things back and forth between two languages is no way to test how good the translation was. Admittedly, if it returns the same as you entered, then it's probably reasonable to assume it's a pretty good translation – or consistently bad at the very least – but don't forget that many words can have multiple meanings in any language and the translation engine has no way of knowing which meaning you want if you enter it without context.

Mambo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

http://www.freetranslation.com

that does a much better job than Google...

...doesn't it Tony? ;-)

Forum home

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!