I resently change my home page to iGoogle. With iGoogle I'm able to translate English to

• Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Chineses(Simplified to traditional)
• Croation
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hindi
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Swedish
• Romanian
• Spanish
• German to French
• French to German

 And those languages back to English.

 

This is a wonderful tool because now I'm able to chat basically to anyone on chess.com who don't speak english.

I also wonder is it possible to add a tool like that on this site?

 

Well, I thought to share this information to the community

 

Another site which has done the same thing for years is babelfish.altavista.com. Of course, automatically translated text sometimes contains big goofs. ;)

I went to google translator and typed "I'm trying out google translator to see what happens." Translating this from English to German gives: "Ich bin von Google Übersetzer, um zu sehen, was passiert." Then from German back to English gives: "I'm from Google translator to see what happens."

I think something gets lost in the translation. 

Edit: Crossposted with likesforests.

Original Text: 

Que alguien me diga si han visto a mi esposo
preguntaba la Doña
Se llama Ernesto, tiene cuarenta años
trabaja de celador, en un negocio de carros
llevaba camisa oscura y pantalón claro
Salió anoche y no ha regresado
y no sé ya qué pensar

 

likesforests' translation:

"Could anyone tell me if they've seen my husband?"

a woman was asking.

"His name's Ernesto and he's 40 years old.

He works as a guard at a car dealership.

He was wearing a dark shirt and light pants.

He left last night and hasn't returned

and I don't know what to think."

 

Google's translation:

 

Altavista translation:

That somebody says to me if they have seen husband the Do6na asked Ernesto is called, has forty years works of watchman, in a business of cars it took dark shirt and clear trousers Left last night and it has not returned and I do not know since to think

lanceuppercut

 

That can enter as # 7 of Rael's Top Rarely use Trophies

You have to be really careful about idiomatic expressions...  There was the case of an experiment with translation software in which the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" was translated from English to Russian, and then from Russian back to English.  The result was "invisible lunatic."

matzleeach wrote:

lanceuppercut

 

That can enter as # 7 of Rael's Top Rarely use Trophies

---

 Perhaps I shouldn't have deleted my post. I'll put it back: 

Here's what I expect from online translators:

 

Go to this site for a laugh at translation errors.

Cowboys leg for dinner anyone?

Couldn't post the extracts directly as I would have gotten into trouble for "bad language" again. See guys I do learn!

Anyone, if you are easily offended, stay the f, stay the h, oh just stay away from the link.

http://rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order/

lanceuppercut_239> Perhaps I shouldn't have deleted my post

Oh, I didn't mean to make you delete your post. I use online translators from time to time so I was just curious to see how Google stacks up against others. It's an improvement, although there's still plenty of room for misinterpretation.