Thanks for your post. Yes, longer input texts can be problematic. When feeding a URL to the Translator, I have noticed that short web pages usually translate fully, but with longer pages, the Translator simply gives up at some point and the balance of the new text is in the original language. Awkward. There's some sense in there being some kind of limit of translation length, I can understand that, but the result could be more graceful. Say, a simple, prominent notice, "Maximum Translation Length Exceeded, original text resumes" in the target language, I guess, or in the current user interface language if the user is logged in-- this gets a little tricky.
I find that, with care, Google Translator does a good job in the languages I use. Probably best not to slam the tool generally when you are asking for assistance with a technical problem. Or post your translation frustrations separately, with specific examples. I just confirmed the "disappearing translation" problem I reported in my original post still occurs. It wasn't a momentary glitch. By the way, the new blank page reflects my default "from" and "to" language, Polish, even when the long-ish text I had been attempting to translate was Russian (to English). So it appears that the Translator is generally resetting itself if I give it "too much" text to translate. Thanks, hen3ry On Jan 1, 12:07 pm, allencraig wrote: > I posted about this going from spanish to english. It seems to be > wholly dependent on the length of the text you want translated. And > that's a Google coding problem (or not, if they are doing it > intentionally) I imagine that there's an exact character count, but > I've not bothered to figure it out. > > It's frustration for sure, but on the other hand, Google's > translations are so poor, maybe it's for the best. There are other > online translators out there. > > A > > On Dec 31 2010, 11:41 am,hen3rywrote: > > > Folks: > > > This may be the same issue as reported by others recently. > > > Suddenly, in the past few days, in Firefox 3.6.13 and Safari 5.0.3 on > > MacOS 10.6.5, translations appear for an instant and then > > disappear. > > > I'm using Russian --> English, but I checked French --> English and a > > similar problem occurs, so this appears to be language-independent. > > > Procedure: > > > 1. go to URL translate.google.com > > 2. Set From: to "Russian" and To: to "English" > > 3. Paste some Russian text into the text box > > 4. Click on the Translate button. > > > After a brief pause, the translation appears to the right of the text > > box under the heading "Russian to English translation". In the brief > > time it is visible, say, 0.5 second, the translation text appears to > > be reasonable, but of course it is difficult to tell. Then that page > > disappears and a new empty one appears. The new page is "clean", that > > is, contains no text, as if there was a simple re-direct to Google > > Translator. > > > This issue appears to be sensitive to the length of text entered. It > > occurs less or not at all with "short" text to be translated, say, 3 > > short paragraphs of typical text. It occurs more often, possibly > > always, as the size of the original text is increases. > > > No such problem observed in Chrome 8.0.552.231. > > > Perhaps this is related: During my experiments, sometimes I noticed > > strangeness with respect to the URL: in seemingly random cases, > > abbreviations of the "from" and "to" languages (seemingly as usual) > > _and_ the original text to be translated are be visible at right in > > the URL. In these cases, entering new, different text to be > > translated and selecting new "from" and "to" languages has no > > effect. Here's the beginning of the URL now visible in Chrome for a > > French to English translation of text beginning "Dans ce musée, il y a > > deux parcours suivant votre but...": > > > > > http://translate.google.com/#fr|en|Dans%20ce%20mus%C3%A9e%2C%20il%20y%20a%20deux%20parcours... > > > From this point, pasting new text to be translated --say, in Russian-- > > and changing the "From" language to Russian has no effect. That may > > be technically correct, as URL-encoded information take highest > > precedence, but when this occurs the translator is effectively broken. > > > I don't know about URL length limits but there must be some, and it > > seems possible the length sensitivity I noted above might be due to > > exceeding some limit in cases in which the text to be translated is > > encoded in the URL. But since the text to be translated is not > > generally visible in the URL, something else is probably going on. > > Perhaps there's a usually hidden intermediate step being made visible? > > > It would be great to have this fixed soon. I hope the information > > above helps. > > > Thanks, > > >hen3ry -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-translate-general?hl=en.
