Google translate???

[avocollector]

Usually 'Google translate' is not too bad in the indo European languages but this from a German website is a real classic;

'Device Type: ARON BS-310S Oscilloscope
Have the oscilloscope from a known defective as a gift ............. only it goes ......... or not ........ the "point "on the screen I can only adjust .......... I get no more trigger (ie, the point from left to right moves no more) what you can not do ?? can you help me '

Wonder if I'll ever get free test gear from a 'known defective'

[dsergeant]

What about a link to the original? Fairly fluent in German here. What I cannot understand with Google translate is why it doesn't seem to understand German word order, something specific to that language and pretty fundamental. There are elements of that in your extract.
Dave

[paulsherwin]

Google Translate is a very basic machine translator and doesn't examine either the grammatical structure or the word context. There have been much more sophisticated translators around for decades so it's not clear why it's so primitive.

There's a story of someone translating Burns's "Great chieftain of the puddin' race" into German and back again and getting "Fat fuhrer of the sausage people" in response. It may be apocryphal but the fact that it's plausible says a lot.

[G8HQP Dave]

I think I read somewhere that Google Translate taught itself how to translate by being given lots of samples of translations and looking for correlations etc. This might be expected to lead to some localism - it can't make good use of context but merely swaps words for their equivalents in the target language. This means that it can be reasonably safely used when the user knows the target language well. Output can be amusing or alarming when the user only knows the source language, but needs to say something in the target language.

[paulsherwin]

The problem may be that Google has to translate between dozens, maybe hundreds, of languages. It's difficult enough to set up effective machine translation between any two languages never mind all the significant languages of the world. Given that Google don't make much money from this it's not surprising that it's little more than a dictionary lookup.

The Star Trek Universal Translator is still some way off.

[dseymo1]

For anyone who hasn't tried it, it's amusing to pass a message through a number of translations, and back to the original language.
Even at its worst, Google is usually better than some of the instructions supplied with imported goods!

[Radio Wrangler]

Some languages also have very different idioms to english, and so literal translations can be rather surprising and come out something like a comedy phrase-book sketch.

David (Mon aeroglisseur a plein d'anguilles)

[Boater Sam]

Never trust Google to translate, but it will try Chinese and Japanese.
Personally I rely on Babel Fish

[emeritus]

One of my favorite translations is this old patent application from 1911. Wireless was a new technology then, and the translator of the French-language original was evidently not familiar with the technical terms of what was then a new technology. It is one of a family of four that relate to an early proposal for direction and range finding using radio.

[G6Tanuki]

I'm reminded of Monty Python and "My Hovercraft is Full of Eels".

[dave cox]

With translation you get what you pay for. Google will usually do if you have enough context to decode the output!

Paid for machine translation is much better, this is priced according to the sophistication of the algorithms employed. If you can afford it, having a human translator proof read the output gives the very best results. Even this can still fall foul on technical content where the human translator doesn't understand the technical aspects

dc

[avocollector]

Originally Posted by dsergeant

What about a link to the original? Fairly fluent in German here.

Sorry but don't now recall where it came from - I'm also fluent in German which is why I was so surprised - normally the translations are not that bad even including word order mistakes.