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TwitterOnline translation services.
I don’t often have need to use online translation services as the need rarely arises and when I have used them in the past they have been pretty unreliable. This morning I found myself needing to use one as my site was featured on an Italian web site about javascript.
My instant reaction was to dig out babelfish (now owned by Yahoo) as it has been around for years so I assumed it would be the most accurate. What came out was readable but didn’t make a lot of sense, some words had clearly been taken out of context and some parts of sentances were in the wrong order gramatically. It worked enough to satisfy my concerns about being insulted in Italian (I wasn’t, the site is very complimentary!) but I thought I would try Google Translate out of interest.
To my suprise Google was considerably better. The majority of the sentances made sense and most of the words seemed to have been translated in context. I don’t know why it suprised me, Googles products are generaly of an incredibly high standard. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t far off and certainly the closest I have ever seen by a long way.
I am sure that people who need translation regularly already know this or more likely use human services to do translation, but I was impressed and thought I’d share my findings.
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Wow, I usually use http://freetranslation.com... Never really tried Google’s translator. Nice post, and nice site man, keep it up :).