How good is Google Translator?

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it translated it pretty well then, but the problem is, languages behave differently.
"i honestly should say - " is not a common thing to say in norwegian. "whole honestly should i say - " would translate better, but it wouldnt be natural for you to think that way.

norwegian tourists w a poor english may actually say stuff like that "excuse me do you know what the clock is?"

^oh yeah you are right in that and its true and of course the other way round too. Somehting you say in your language would make absolutely no sense as litteraly translated into english

Haha!! That suddenly reminds me of a book I have seen. Tourists of other languages saying things wrong and crazy in english as they think how they would say it in their language. That book is hilarious, really as it contains missunderstandings, embarrasments and funny expressions in a way a native english speaker never would express it!

Last edited by xalepax on 26 Aug 2009, 4:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

allright I translated a text from Polish to Swedish on GT and it sounds ridiculous:

haha!!

translation to English went a bit better I think:



in Polish this sentence had no gramatical errors :p oh and the last part was meant to say "as the one I just typed in this small window with a scroll on the right"

lol yeah it does. see on that sign from the train station in the picture I posted, the one below is how it's supposed to be pronounced.

now say it fast 10 times!

i have one by stewart clark called "dont smell the balloons" its part of a series, its a norwegian edit, so it has a title norwegians will find funny, but may very well be the same as internationally. the examples inside the book are from around the world.

"smell" means "bang"

I'm not online 24/7, checking every forum, believe it or not.

And I did produce a video with kitten content eventually...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVOGUPpUdq0[/youtube]

It sucks, I tried translating Bao dem( a vietnamese song that is my favorite song of all time) into english and it gave me gibberish. Heres the lyrics if you wanna copy-paste and try it yourself.
Thấp thoáng trong đêm
Ánh mắt rưng rưng
Mái tóc pha sương bạc theo tháng năm.

Nhắm mắt cho qua
Những giấc mơ xưa
Những đứa con thơ giờ đây quá xa la.

Chìm trong yêu thương ngày xưa
Bên bếp hồng con vui đùa.
Giờ đây như đang ngủ mê
Cơn mê dài, không quay về.

(điệp khúc)
Từng áng mây (chợt) khuất lấp ánh trăng mờ
Mình tôi đứng chông chênh.
Gạt nỗi đau
Nước mắt cứ xuôi dòng
Trong bão đêm.

Nắng chiếu đôi vai
Nắng chiếu đôi vai, khoé mắt chân chim hằn sâu nỗi u hoài.
Nói có ai hay
Nói có ai hay, tiếng gió đưa cây, chiều buông xuống hoang tàn.

Chìm trong yêu thương ngày xưa
Bên bếp hồng con vui đùa.
Giờ đây như đang ngủ mê
Cơn mê dài, không quay về.

neither am I in fact, so its natural to miss things going on
Dont worry about it, it was just a fun thing at the moment

And I saw that video, I did told you that I rated it five stars?



You know, by the time you wrote that I had so much fun at it, so funny and impossible

I just had to reply to this, didn't I?

Trikkekonduktørsuniformsknappehull.

nordöstersjökustartilleriflygspaningssimulatoranlägeningsmaterielunderhållsuppföljningssystemdiskussioninläggförberedelsearbeten

Hehe, gotta love Scandinavian languages.

^^yep, that's exactly why I love them

The longest word in Swedish which isn't a composition of nouns is actually internationalisering, meaning internationalization.

> Hallohvordanhardudetidagharduhattdetbrajegharikkehattdetsåbrapågrunnavatenvennavmegmedaspergerfikkbrusdagensinødelagt

Technically speaking, agglutinative languages like Finnish and Magyar are capable of producing much longer words than this.

As far as google's auto detect feature is concerned, it still needs a LOT of work. For example, I entered transliterated Tuvan lyrics into Google translate with the autodetect on for s**ts and giggles to see what it would detect it as.

Google translate detected the language as Turkish. Even though Tuvan is a Turkic language, it's about as close to Turkish as English is to Norwegian, as they are both classified in the 'Germanic' subgroup of Indo-European languages.