Google translator

I've used google translator a few times and have been very impressd with the Chinese to English translations, but the English-Slovak one is awful!
This evening I wanted to check a sentence that a friend of mine wrote: The translation started 'Thou knowest Czech!' It seems that the people working on the Slovak version of google translator finished their work around the middle of the Nineteeth Century...

Out of curiosity, I tried English-to-Russian for some text I knew well. It did a very good job.

In the middle of the last century, a French scientist asserted that science would never be able to know what kinds of substances composed the sun and stars, because not a single flying apparatus had been able to approach the flaming hot surfaces of the heavenly bodies.

В середине прошлого века французский ученый утверждал, что наука никогда не сможет понять, какие вещества, состоящие на солнце и звезды, потому что ни один летательный аппарат был в состоянии обращаться в пылающем горячей поверхности небесных тел.

I'd always thought that Chinese (Simplified) and Chinese (Traditional) would produce the same results on Google Translate using different character forms, but in fact they don't, as translation of that same paragraph shows:

在上个世纪，法国科学家中说，科学永远不可能知道组成的太阳和星星什么样的物质，因为没有一个飞行装置已能接近火焰热表面的天体。

在中間上個世紀，法國科學家斷言，科學永遠不可能知道什麼樣的物質組成的太陽和星星，因為沒有一個飛行裝置已能接近火焰熱表面的天體。

(duplicate post)

The Vietnamese to English translations give a useful, general idea of the topic but no where near an accurate translation.

Out of curiosity, I tried English-to-Russian for some text I knew well. It did a very good job.

I'm amazed it did such a good job, especially for such a long passage.

Russian to English sucks, though
Суд счел, что преступлению бывшего майора милиции, расстрелявшего людей в супермаркете, косвенно поспособствовал министр внутренних дел Рашид Нургалиев.

The court found that the crimes of the former police major, killed people in the supermarket, indirectly contributed Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev

It doesn't see active/passive constructions, word order in Russain, etc. It does a pretty good job on the phrase level, but not with sentences.

I have to agree with zhp; I tried a passage from a well known story that I read when I was in school, and it didn't do a very good job.

Рассуждая таким образом, очутилься он в одной из главных улиц Петербурга, перед домом старинной архитектуры. Улица была заставлена екипажами, кареты одна за другою катились к освещённому подъезду.

Arguing thus ochutilsya it in one of the main streets of St. Petersburg, in front of the house of ancient architecture. The street was crowded ekipazhami, coaches one after another rolled up to the lighted entrance.

I have to agree with zhp; I tried a passage from a well known story that I read when I was in school, and it didn't do a very good job.

Dunno if you typed or copied-and-pasted that passage, NA, but there are two Russian misspellings: "очутилься" should be "очутился"; and "екипажами" should be "экипажами." Since these are the very words Google translator "missed," it makes a pretty big difference.

The corrected version then:

Reasoning in this way, he found himself in one of the main streets of St. Petersburg, in front of the house of ancient architecture. The street was crowded with carriages, carriages, one after another rolled up to the lighted entrance.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? (I can't read Russian at all, but this almost looks like natural English.)

I'm very impressed by Google Translate. I've never had occasion to use English-Slovak, so I don't know about that, but I have sometimes used it to find translations of idiomatic Dutch expressions into English, and it is amazing at that.

Sorry, folks; the clumsy translation at #7 was the result of my having misspelled the Russian when I typed it. An editor should never be trusted to proofread his own work. The translation at #9 is correct. The passage is from Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades."

The Google translator is unique in that it lets you give feedback on the results they give you. I'm sure things like "thou knowest" could be fixed pretty easily if you give them your improved version.

'thou knowest is symptomatic of a pretty dismal version of google translator. I agree with #9 that the Russian to English version works reasonably well. Here is another bit of 'English' served up by the Slovak version.

This would Byla property damage die, eating is too Soon is our bite-KRASNYHO CeKay in life.

I would send in the correction if it were just tinkering but this version needs a major overhaul.

I found this at Google Translate Help: Google Translate is an automatic translator -- that is, it works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead. Most commercial machine-translation systems in use today have been developed using a rule-based approach, and require a lot of work to define vocabularies and grammars. Our system takes a different approach; we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model.

Google really upped their game in the last year or so.

There's a dozen or so lanaugages I speak to a basic level thanks mostly to a bit of homework before travelling. Until a year ago, with my phrase book and a basic grammar knoweldge I could still fine-tune online translations, patch the grammar and spot obvious mistranslations. That's no longer the case; if I try to improve an English to Polish translation, I now just make it worse (as the receptionist in a Polish hotel explained to me yesterday amid much giggling).

The improvement in online transaltion is spectacular, although I admit OP's "thou" example is unimpressive.

I tried to translate the text from NA #1 post to Slovenian. The translation in definitely not OK and it's pretty difficult to figure out the meaning:

"V sredini prejšnjega stoletja, francoski znanstvenik trdil, da znanost nikoli ne bi mogli vedeti, katere vrste snovi, ki sestavljajo sonce in zvezde, ker ne ena, ki plujejo pod aparat je lahko pristop, goreče vroče površine nebesnih teles."

But than again, this is a complicated passage.

Have you tried the translator feature for Bing.com? The feature there is similar to the Google translator. However, it may give different results. Hope this helps! Here's a link for you to try it out.

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/?form=mfeina&publ=yanswer&crea=text_mfeina_ya_translator_bing1_1x1/

Bing_OutreachTeam

From the original text, in Russian:

4 октября 1957 г. весь мир стал свидетелем выдающегося события - в Советском Союзе был осуществлён успешный запуск первого искусственного спутника Земли.

First, the Google translation:

October 4, 1957 the whole world witnessed an outstanding event - in the Soviet Union had successfully launched the first artificial Earth satellite.

Next, the Bing translation:

on 4 October 1957 the whole world witnessed an outstanding event in the Soviet Union was a successful launch of the first artificial satellite of the Earth.

The Bing translation ignored the dash in the original, which may make comprehension a little more dificult. For some reason, both+ translations ignored one verb in the original: осуществлён, accomplished. The literal translation would be "...in the Soviet Union had been +accomplished the successful launch...."

Edited by NorthAmerican

Neither does very well with a simple Chinese sentence from today's news -- 丰田汽车在全球范围，包括中国在内，实施了大规模的召回，给中国消费者带来了影响和担心，在此我表示真诚道歉 -- though the autodetect feature on Bing is convenient.

Google: Toyota on a global scale, including China, the implementation of a large-scale recall, the Chinese had an impact on consumers and concerns, and I sincerely apologize.

Bing: Toyota Motor on a global scale, including China, to implement a massive recall, to the effect of Chinese consumers and worried that, in this my sincere apologies.

(It should read something like "Toyota Motors has made a large-scale recall throughout the world, including China, affecting Chinese consumers and bringing them worries, and for this I sincerely apologize." )

I tried out a simple Czech sentence with the Bing translator: Those umíš English, fine! How do you, what is new and I don't know ... come on, we must.

It translated Ty (you) as 'Those', it was not able to translate umíš (can) and translated 'česky' into 'English'.

I presume that with Czech and Slovak being comparatively small languages, they haven't had the input required for such automated translation software to work as well as it does in Russian and even the Chinese one is not too bad. .