Agree, % have no real meaning in this context; careless thinking. I
was rather trying to grade the various language combinations on some
kind of relative scale, say, a scale 1-10.
True, it is an amazing tool. This said, it is still a little scaring
to think of all the use of it, and the extent that it seems to be used
and trusted for unknown (for the person using GT) languages. Even in
the (probably) best-working of language pairs, sentences come up with
a wholly wrong sense compared to the original, quite often.
On 5 Jan, 23:29, Harald Korneliussen wrote:
> I think the 55 number came from a machine translation competition a
> while back. It's not a very meaningful number by itself, even if we
> find out just how it got that score.
>
> How good Google translate is depends on your expectations. It is not
> as good as professional translation, or even amateur translation by
> someone skilled in both languages - but most of us don't know all the
> languages Google Translate does.
>
> As machine translation goes, it's IMO pretty amazing. It can tell that
> the John in
>
> > My name is John
>
> should be left untranslated in most languages, but if it is in the
> context
>
> > It is written in the Gospel of John
>
> It IS translated, and correctly, too (at least to the languages I
> know). Even more amazing, the phrase
>
> > Jeg så en dårlig film i dag, den het "Hjelp, vi flyr"
>
> is perfectly translated to English, with a correct, non-literal
> translation of the title.
>
> In general, it seems translations to English are far better than
> translations from English, or into anything else. Translations from
> French appear to be especially good. It seems:
>
> 1. Languages that are close to English translate well into English
> (Dutch, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish)
>
> 2. Languages with very different syntax from English tend to translate
> poorly. Different word order, highly inflective or agglutinative seems
> hard for it. But it has definitively become better at agglutination.
> Sometimes it comes up with perfectly reasonable translations for word-
> parts that aren't even real words!
>
> 3. Languages with few speakers seem to do worse: Icelandic and Irish
> Gaelic can give pretty weird translations IME.
