Google translate
 

How good / bad Google translator to translate from Japanese?
Here is an example of translation site.
I'm just starting to learn Japanese and want to know - can this tool help me? :confused:

Sorry if this topic has been discussed previously :rolleyes:

Fine for one word / one word. Not good for grammar or real comprehension.

I agree. If you're just doing a quick lookup on a word or two, Google translate most likely won't let you down. Things like paragraphs are normally botched just like any other translator on the web.

Look, I took a translation, from google, just to check, even though I knew the meaning. Which was a song lyric, which meant our love would be forbidden even by the gods. Now, I used google, it gave me the meaning as, something like, Love by us monkeys, washing with soap and never....yeah...so I don't think google can do more than a word or two.

Hasn't it improved lately? For example, French to English or English to French has improved a lot when it comes to structure and grammar etc! And a lot of common phrases are translated perfectly!

German->English Babelfish has always been pretty good. I translated an entire, long and technical newspaper article and it was easily readable.

I don't know about other languages, but you will never get a perfect translation between English and Japanese for anything other than the most basic sentences. Japanese and English are just so different from each other.

This is true. Try translationparty.com to see what happens between English and Japanese machine translation.

I just took the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Japan and ran it through TranslationParty's engine:
became

With just one back translation:

The speeder is stopped on a crowded street by several combat-hardened stormtroopers who look over the two robots.

to

スピード違反は、混雑した通りに2台のロボットに目を� �す、いくつかの戦闘硬化ストームトルーパーで停止し� �いる

ro

Speeding, the two robots look through the crowded streets, fighting has stopped in curing some Stormtroopers.

Notice how the actors of the verb "to look" is shifted from the stormtroopers to the robots. Also notice how the noun "speeder" has been changed to a verb and the the adjective "combat-hardened" has become the noun "fighting". The stopped speeder is now "stopped fighting". I don't know where "curing" came from.

What's the correct translation for that, MMM?

What's the correct translation for what?

I really like that word! Thanks!

For this;

The speeder is stopped on a crowded street by several combat-hardened stormtroopers who look over the two robots.

I am not sure, but it isn't what the machine translation spit out. A native speaker would be the best to answer that. (I couldn't find a script with stage directions in Japanese.)

Ok, can you give me a fairly grammatically difficult sentence in Japanese?

Any random sentence!

Just go to Wikipedia Japan

生物学が自然史学の一部だった時代には、記載生物学が 主体だった。現代生物学は、実験が主体になっている。 さらに将来は、ゲノムやプロテオーム研究などで蓄積さ れた膨大なデータをコンピュータで処理し、そこから生 命の原理に迫る生物情報学が主体になるかもしれない。

How bad is this translation? (I've understood the gist of it up until the "perhaps")

Statement biology was subject in the times when biology is portion of natural history.Today as for biology, experiment has become subject. Furthermore in the future, the enormous data which is accumulated in the genome and [puroteomu] research etc is processed on the computer, perhaps the living thing information and computer science which from there is approached to the principle of life becomes subject,

EDIT; The reason I asked you to give me a sentence is so that you'd be able to tell me how bad a translation is when I put it through something other than google translate!

Does that translation make sense to you?

Like I said, I got the gist of it up until perhaps! But of course, as I don't understand the Japanese, I don't know if it's the right "gist" lol.

Basically, what I've understood is this; （quickly)

Biology was theoretical when it was included in natural history. Today, it's experimental (as in observational)! In the future, the enormous data carried in the genome will be processed by computers!

I'm a native speaker and I don't understand one thing about it. I can't figure out any gist, either. I think you only think you get the gist.

To me it seems like that translation went off the rails at the first sentence.

The trouble with thinking you understand the gist of the translated text is that if you don't know the original language, and if you don't have some other information to serve as a sanity check, you can't know whether the gist of the text has been preserved, corrupted, or completely garbled. For example, given the source here, it seems likely that the original sentence discussed some relationship between biology and natural history, but that's all you can conclude without further work.

Not only is the meaning obscured, but the English generated is just plain ungrammatical. It would be prudent to assume that going the other way would likely produce equally ungrammatical Japanese.

Personally, not knowing Japanese myself, I'm a big fan of machine translation aids. They've helped me to understand a lot of Japanese text that would be otherwise unreadable. And in the process of trying to squeeze answers out of these tools, I've learned some features of the language. But the problem is far from solved. Google Translate in particular needs vast amounts of work.

I find the situation rather frustrating, since it seems clear to me that Google's machine translation system in particular seems to be dropping a lot of useful information on the floor which in principle it should be able to use to refine the result. It also doesn't tell you whether there is any ambiguity in the particular translation generated or what alternate translations for words or phrases might be available, so you could select something more appropriate for the context.