do you guys use those web language translation thingies?

greenspun.com : LUSENET : zootzie : One Thread

After months of participation, I get to graduate and ASK a question....

Do you guys use those language translation services such as the Alta Vista one Siobhan mentioned? I'm curious because I'm thinking of writing one of my upcoming journal entries in Spanish, but I would like people to have a chance to read a translated version for kicks.

-- andres (ladolcevita@writeme.com), September 07, 2000

Answers

i too, have it bookmarked, but i don't like using it because it's so fantastically inaccurrate. sometimes i use it for small sentences or single words, and even then it's not right all the time. i think the idea of them is good, but it's so hard to do it well.

-- siobhan (zootzie@yahoo.com), September 08, 2000.

yeah I have Altavista Translations bookmarked on my home computer. Its essential if you take foreign language courses.

-- mike (supermike1999@yahoo.com), September 08, 2000.

I don't use them, I think they're probably best for games like Em and Siobhan's, because they can be so inaccurate. You have to have a good enough knowledge of the language to know when it's giving you a word that's not really what you want. I'm majoring in Spanish and I just have a big ol' S-E diccionario.

-- Jamie (starvingartiste@yahoo.com), September 09, 2000.

Thanks for the replies guys. I wrote an entry in Spanish today and did a "translation" with Alta Vista's Babel that's pretty awful. Even taking into account that I used some Chilean slang, it's still a pretty crappy job of translating. But I suppose it certainly would be better than nothing if you were translating a language that you didn't know at all, such as Russian or something of the sort.

-- andres (ladolcevita@writeme.com), September 10, 2000.

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