Why are there a million idiots out there who...?

Question

Think online translators are the end all be all of language. They will less than 0.5% of the time be correct. The longer and more complicated your sentence is, or even more complicated languages, the worse the will be! They hardly ever get individual words right! So I guess I have to ask a question:

How many people feel the same way, and how many people choose to defend their precious online translators. Support your answer.

Answer 1

While I agree that online translators are not perfect, it is a bit harsh to claim there are a million idiots out there who believe in them. According to my last survey there were only 651,235 idiots who trusted online translators.

Answer 2

I think you're exaggerating. I would say they're perfectly correct about 10% of the time; you're right that it depends on how long and complicated the sentence is, but if someone thinks carefully about what she wants to say, and avoids idioms and less-common definitions of a word, and doesn't make typos, she should be at least understood about 75% of the time.

No, computer translators very rarely express things in the most idiomatically apropriate way, but then neither do people. In your question, for example, you have "the end all be all of language"--I would say "the be-all and the end-all". You have "They will less than 0.5% of the time be correct"--I would express that as "They will be correct less than 0.5% of the time." Now, I'm not saying my way is better than yours, but--oh yeah, I guess that is what I'm saying. I sometimes answer questions here about French, and typically I'll do better than an online translator, but not necessarily as well as a native speaker of French.

That being said, In my daily life I'll normally only use online translators for translating from German (which I have studied a fair bit) into English (my native language) or occasionally French since my husband tells me that the French tends to come out clearer. If I need to write something important in German (or REALLY important in French) I would run it past a native speaker.

Answer 3

There's a simple test that can show how "well" an online translator works. Translate your text with the online translator, and then take the result and translate it back in the original language with the same online translator! In 99% you will not recognize the text, it will be garbled as hell.

Online translators cannot work with full sentences because translating does not mean to simply replace words with their translation. Translating means *understanding* the text and rewriting it in another language. And software cannot understand human language (as of today), therefore this cannot work.

Answer 4

I agree. I have been studying Spanish for 8 years and I personally feel offended when people use an online translator and think thats all there is to knowing how to speak another language. If that was really all there is to learning Spanish then I just wasted 8 years of education, a trip to Spain, and hundreds of dollars in books and other resources. Maybe they're just desperate for the points, lol.

Answer 5

I completely agree with you. Online translators give so much garbage and it's frustrating to ask a question in the language section just to get a machine translation back. I admit I do use online translators, but only to check one or two words at a time, and only in languages that I've already studied. They just can't be relied on for anything else.

Answer 6

They can be useful to get the general meaning of a web page or a docoment, written in a language that you really don't know, because sometimes you don't need a full, complete and correct translation, and online translators are fast and easy to use.

The problem is that some people use them wrong. They are just a tool, they can't solve all the linguistic problems.

Answer 7

I think it depends....

if languages are similar then it's less problem....


but this is a translation of babel fish:

Crew-serve U is rush elegant words, the water service is Moscow. Yoo poem Oh it is a nation which leads the economic community. The telegraphic office is the Russia Soviet Union socialism federal republic.
rather unreadable ...
it should be about Russia and Crew-serve U should be "official language"

and not "water service" but "capital city"

Answer 8

They are completely unreliable. For those who think online translators are great, translate a sentence into another language and then back to English again.....just look at how screwed up it is

Answer 9

i feel you. seriously. and i'm glad you brought this up. you know, it annoys me when my ex tries to write to me in french...i'm semi-fluent in french and i obviously see a lot of mistakes, even if he wants to write simple sentences! simply everything does not agree (like gender, color, etc). I can't make sense of all the stuff he's writing and i know he uses an online translator to communicate with me lol. oh and i DO point out all of his mistakes. also, i tried translating a sentence from english to spanish and it didn't make sense at all (i am fluent in spanish). so yeah, they're completely unreliable!

Answer 10

if you don't like them, don't use them. Simple.

I sometimes have to support our Russian office, and http://translate.google.com does a decent job of making sure I at least understand the intent and context. I have no illusions about getting a perfect or even decent translation.