Comments on: How to Reach a Global Audience With Google Translate

By: veronicay

veronicay — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:18:19 +0000

As pretty much everyone has said, it’s an awful, awful idea to do this. You’ll make yourself a laughing stock. If you are serious about selling to non-anglophone markets, show some respect for your potential clients by getting your site translated properly — remembering that the marketing message to Spain, for example, might use quite different concepts to one aimed at British people; it’s culture as well as language. So a word-for-word translation, even by a human being, is unlikely to be the best solution.

By: Stormrider

Stormrider — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:54:54 +0000

Generally these translation tools give a pretty poor result, I wouldn’t want to use it to translate a website – I’d rather hire a translator and get it done properly.

By: kld

kld — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:36:54 +0000

One way I get a better translation from Google Translate is to reverse-translate the output text to see if it still says what I intended to say, then make adjustments in my language to get a better meaning and flow. This helps you catch some of the little quirks that Translate sometimes exhibits.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:20:55 +0000

As a translator from German to English, I can say that the standard of machine translation is high compared to the gibberish that machines normally churn out. That said, it is still very poor and in no way could be used commercially, unless you want to make yourself a laughing stock.

By: Craig Buckler

Craig Buckler — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:13:32 +0000

@SandPitBoy
Yep, it certainly looks as though you should be careful with it (and any other auto-translation tool). However, I’m sure you’d get better results with simpler text.

By: SandpitBoy

SandpitBoy — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:59:22 +0000

So as a result of the comments, I can safely conclude that it’s pretty much a waste of time using this on a commercial site as a reliable source of translated content. Nice!

By: Pacifer

Pacifer — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:59:04 +0000

The Norwegian translator is not good. It’s very random if you’ll get comprehendable translation from Norwegian to English.

For a while I tried to use it to translate my blog articles to English. However the amount of work involved cleaning up the language, almost rendered it useless compared to just translate everything manually from scratch.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:12:09 +0000

@LeRenard for Japanese or Chinese, it can’t even figure out one sentence.

By: Craig Buckler

Craig Buckler — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:27:56 +0000

I guess it will depend on the type of text being translated. My example uses the opening paragraphs from “War of the Worlds” because I knew it’d be a tough task. Short, punchy and factual sentences will translate better.

By: Pixel Ink

Pixel Ink — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:31:32 +0000

I have experimented with Google's language tools on our online businesses. I have never ranked using them for content and I have also read feedback about our content being unreadable by anyone that is the native language. The only exception was the Spanish ebook we published, which I guess worked pretty well. I cannot imagine the Asian languages are even close. Give it time though, Ray Kurtzweil will figure it out.

By: LeRenard

LeRenard — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:08:40 +0000

As a frenchman, the translated text is not understandable at all.
All these translation tools are far from being usable on more than a single word or expression.
At least, please if you use a translation tool, make sure the original content is easily reachable.
If I took the time to learn english, I can at least have the right to get a decent version of the text so I can understand it fully.