The FAQ still refers to "Contribute a better translation" which no
longer exists. Apparently the new yellow highlighter is acting as a
replacement -- am I right? Are my choices sent to Google to improve
future translations?
Unfortunately the yellow highlight approach has a couple of major
flaws:
(1) sometimes Google chooses incorrect phrase boundaries. Here is a
Spanish-to-English example ("|" represents Google's chosen
boundaries):
Así | que no | sería una | sorpresa...
So | do not | be a | surprise...
The sentence actually means "So | it would not be | a
surprise..." (Así que | no sería | una sorpresa...) or "So | it should
not be | a surprise...", but it seems impossible to explain this to GT
because of the bad phrase boundaries.
(2) Sometimes a word is simply left out of the output
El gobierno del presidente Toledo desarrollo una iniciativa...
Government of President Toledo development initiative...
In this case Google left out the word "El" (the) from the English
output. I can change "Government" to "The government" but presumably
Google would remain unaware that "El" = "The".
It seems to me, in general, that GT transforms the input too much. I
have caught it changing the meaning of the text on a regular basis by
using overly "clever" translations instead of using a safer, more
literal translation. And sometimes its output is just bizarre:
Original: The crazy man killed him.
GT output: El loco lo mataron.
I think this output is ungrammatical and means "The crazy they killed
him."
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