Google translate

[Rukito]

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?

Sorry if this topic has been discussed previously

[MMM]

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

[WingsToDiscovery]

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.

[Raingirlxd]

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.

[noodle]

Originally Posted by MMM

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

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!

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by noodle

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.

[MMM]

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.

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by MMM

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:

Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun".

became

Japan is an island country in East Asia. Pacific, Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea, Eastern Russia, Taiwan, China Northern, Eastern, has spread to the south of the Sea of Okhotsk. "I said," Why Japanese characters he is the source of Japan to do every day, "To set the date of the land does not increase, said" he knows.

[MMM]

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.

[noodle]

What's the correct translation for that, MMM?