How good is Google Translate?

Does this translate to "Game over, Blue team wins, Red team loses" in Japanese?



Have any of you used Google Translate to well ... translate stuff. How accurate have you found it to be?

 

I think "awful" describes it pretty accurately.

Single words? Yeah, but there are better (depending on your language).
Meaning of a sentence? Can get it totally wrong.
Whole sentences? Nope.
Translating stuff back and forth? Well, see for yourself:

 

whoops, my bad, this is actually correct, a rare victory for google translate

deleted my old post

 

My friends used to use Google translate for their French homework and then give it to me to check over, it was always just wrong. If I ever use it, it's to get a general understanding of what something is about, but never to actually communicate.

 

Google translate is horrible if you try to translate a whole sentence. Just like all automatic translations. Sometimes it works or gets the meaning across but sometimes it will be completely wrong. You might also end up badly insulting your players if you don't have someone to look over the result.

 

On one occasion Google Translate translated "Is fuath liom é", which is the Irish for "I hate it", into "It is like it fuath". Which is why I never use it when I've got an Irish-English dictionary to hand.

I think I once came across a site that used Google Translate to translate a sentence into 10 different languages after one another (English -> German -> Chinese -> French -> Afrikaans...) and then back into the original language. I don't think it ever got the same phrase back.

 

Do not use it for translations. Get a person who can do manual translations.

Oh, and get another person to double-check the translations, in case the original person used Google Translate to make a fool of you.

 

it definitely has some issues, as shown by translating back and forth, but to be honest i still think its pretty amazing. it may not be perfect, but it is certainly a big step forward. apparently they are working on a live voice translation app so you could talk back and forth with someone as if you had an interpreter standing there. i'm sure its still many a year away from being anywhere close to reliable, but it's also supposed to be one of those fancy machine learning algorithm type thingies.

 

Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong, and generally wrong so many more times than the few Germans saying things in English so insulting bad to me innocently that I would laugh that I wouldn't use it.

I've tried using in it in languages I don't know hardly at all, say to figure out the English word to various Portuguese, Spanish, or Castilian names for various body parts and what often saved me on those attempts was looking up the medical name for those body parts. So Google Translate is a lot more work to get it right. It's better to leave it in your native language and leave the translation up to the user. I've found most people that speak other than English languages natively don't have the patience of English speakers dealing with foreigners butchering their own native language. Case in point: could you imagine internet phreak talk and chat talk in any other language but absurdly distorted English, linguistically and symbolically?

A UN translator wouldn't use it and wouldn't need to.

 

depends upon language and case. For example a Bangla word "গোলাম আজম পুত্র"(pronunciation:ghulam azam putra) translates into "son of bitch". Where it should be "son of ghulam azam". Clearly google even fails to realize, the mentioned name is not feminine

 

I actually think Google Translate has gotten worse. Instead of translating on a word-on-word basis it tries to translate it by sentence. If it would just translate each word the idea would come across a lot better than it currently does. Any bilingual person can tell you that Google Translate should not be used on anything other than your foreign language homework.

Edit: Sometimes it gets it amazingly correct; but usually it is a bit off or completely wrong.

 

Translating word by word is fine when going between two languages which share the same sentence structure, but if the two languages have have different structures. For example if "please pass me the salt" were translated into Welsh directly word for word it would come out as "os gwelwch yn dda pasiwch y fi yr halen" which is wrong. It should be "pasiwch yr halen y fi os gwelwch yn dda", which can only be done by analysing the whole sentence.

Of course, Google translate doesn't handle that particularly well anyway, if you type "please pass the salt" it ignores the "please" entirely instead of putting "os gwelwch yn dda" on the end, but it does move "(to) me/y fi" to after "the salt/yr halen", which is good.

 

So for those of you who are fluent in Japanese, did it correctly translate those terms? Or is it now saying something like :

Game Over you noobs. Y'o gots no skillz!

 

Yep I understand where you are coming from.

I still think if you put "The pretty girl talks" and translate it to Spanish, most people could understand "La bonita niña hablas." Which translates incorrectly, as the adjective is after the noun in Spanish. In more complex translations google can just gives out a clusterf*** that is nothing close to the original meaning, whereas a word for word translation would at least get the general idea out there(hopefully).

 

Words in English can have different meanings to the same words in American English so that pretty much sums up how useful something like Google Translate really is.

 

it does indeed translate "correctly" however it would probably sound better to say something like:
ブルーチームが勝った
レッドチームを負けた
(ゲームオーバー is fine)

 

Haha, thats the best idea I've ever heard.

 

Think about it this way: Translation is tremendously difficult even for humans who are trained for that specific purpose. And our brain is doing pretty well with languages. But it's still very hard (at least if you go beyond very simple stuff).

So ... it certainly does have its purpose (getting a very rough idea if you don't have a person that knows both languages at hand ... and if you are aware that the translation might be misleading) ... but that's about it.

I mean, it's kind of funny to discuss this on an Internet forum where there's plenty of misunderstandings even without translation (and that even happens on forums that only have native speakers of the given language). In other words: Even if one person writes something down, and another person using the same language is reading it, there may be very different understandings of what was actually meant.

 

Single words... maybe.
Sentences or a whole game? No Way! Even Single words used wrong can look so damn unproffesional. Better stay with english then, or wait until you got a few players from different countrys, I think its not hard to find someone who would like to translate your game. For many games there is not much to translate that can be done quickly.
Or use a professional translation service, I think they are not so expensive. (depending on how much)

 

I've done the honour of putting the message through Google translate to English back and forth 12 times.
Here is the message:

Does this translate to "Game over, Blue team wins, Red team loses" in Japanese? Have any of you used Google Translate to well ... translate stuff. How accurate have you found it to be?

Here is the result:

At the present time. The team plays in red and blue, you can Google translation, if you want to translate is tool that can be found.

 

I guess it's trying to secretly tell us something.

 

Do not use Google Translate!
Use Google Drive!

Common words translation for games

 

For simple and few words, I believe it can admissible but for a long string of text, dialogue or story; I believe a translator would be your best bet.

 

I'm Japanese and I'm afraid I can say those translations are AWFUL probably just like "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US".

"勝" has an okurigana (accompanying letter) error and "失う" is a complete mistranslation.

"ブルーチームの勝ち" or "ブルーチーム勝利"
"レッドチームの負け" or "レッドチーム敗北"

would be appropriate.

Google Translate is completely useless for localization.
Sometimes I receive e-mails machine translation attached but I never read them