How accurate is Alta Vista's Babel Fish web application?

Question

Please see:
.
http://babelfish.altavista.com/

--> Is it acceptable in general? <--

Answer 1

It depends on the language pair. Let's do a simple experiment.

Your question, "How accurate is Alta Vista's Babel Fish web application?", when translated into the following languages and then back into English, yields:

French: "How much specifies is the application of fish sequence of Babel of Alta Vista?"

German: "Is application of fishnets Babel Alta Vista as exact?"

Russian: "How is accurate the application of a rod of fishes babel Alta Vista?"

Japanese: "Is application of the net how Babelfish of accuracy Alta Vista?"

...so the short answer is, it's not very accurate. None of the round-trip translations recognized "Babel Fish" as a proper noun, and the French version didn't even preserve the notion of accuracy or exactness.

I am a professional Japanese-English translator, by the way, and I see no reason to think I'll lose work to a machine anytime soon. Eventually, yes, but not for quite a while yet.

Answer 2

My Grandma told me it doesn't always translate acurate...
I don't know spanish but She does, I have a website and was showing her Alta Vista to know how good it was (it looked good to me LOL). She told me that some things didn't translate accurately. The programers need to work on it, and then there's those things where if in a sentance it could mean one thing while put in a different context it could mean another thing, but if it's programed to translate the literal word and not consider such things then it will ALWAYS come out messed up.

Good luck!

Answer 3

The translation will get your point across but the proper usage of words gets overlooked. I have used i in messages to my son's girlfriend in Germany, it is always good for a few laughs.

Answer 4

IT is not acceptable.

It doesnt translate that well and the program is so stupid. I know this because I speak english, japanese, and korean all fluently, but the translator... doesnt even use proper grammer. It cant even translate "hello" in proper korean.

Answer 5

Well i have used it to translate chinese characters and the words come out fine but there is definite problem with the Numbers

Answer 6

It's accurate in some, but not so in others, especially Asian languages. Often you get literal translations so you have to make some sense of it.

Answer 7

I wouldn't trust an online translator.

Answer 8

words yes grammer.. absolutely not.