Sunday, March 28, 2010

Google Translate - Is it reliable?


Google Translate is a powerful and Free tool for doing translation of any text and webpage online.

We can do the translation from here.

Using this tool is very simple and easy.

Either we can enter the text to be translated or the url of the webpage. And, we can upload the document also.

Very cool feature is "Detect language" feature.

Even if you don't know the source language of the text, just select "Detect language" in the "Translate From" drop-down list.

This tool will automatically detect the source language. Interestingly it will detect the language while typing the text itself.

For example, immediately after typing "et", this tool has detected the source language as French.

From technical perspective, definitely this tool is a powerful tool.

Now, my question is whether translation from this tool is reliable or not?.

I am planning to use this tool more for our future web2.0 projects. So, I started testing this tool by inputting some text in different languages and translated them back to the same language.

For example, first I translated the text "Why Google should stay in China" from English to Chinese.

I got below text as translation output.

谷歌为什么要留在中国.

Again, I translated this Chinese text into English. And, I got the text "Why does Google want to stay in China"

i-e The original text "Why Google should stay in China" is changed into "Why does Google want to stay in China" during two translations.

i-e The text is completely changed to give the opposite meaning after translation.

I don't know whether this change happened during English-Chinease translation or Chinese-English translation. If you know Chinese you can specify it thro' comment section.

Anyway, I am just thinking whether it is reliable or not. If you have used Google translate previously/frequently, you can share your experience.

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