I've spent some time trying my hand at translating some phrases, conversations, and emails that I've gotten while working here in Japan. I really appreciate having Google Translate available to get a general idea of what is being said in Japanese after it's been translated to English, but the translation program/software/algorithms leave a little to be desired.
I find myself wanting to split up some word chunks from Japanese and rearrange them as individual pieces rather than a single, incorrectly- grouped chunk of words/ideas. For example, I just tried translating "Chadにいつも..." which, in Japanese breaks down to three parts: Chad (subject/person) に particle showing the direction or subject an action is taken to. (Functions the same way as "to" in English here.) and いつも or 'always'. Google Translate recognized only two parts: 'Chad' and 'にいつも'. Rather, they should have been identified as three separate parts as listed above. This happened a number of times while trying to translate a few lines of Facebook comments my friends had made on a photo. Is there any community where people can work on this stuff and treat Google translate as a more user-based tool? Of course, Google would be taking a risk in slapping its name on something done by its users. I see a lot of potential for growth in the functionality of Google translate if there were some more transparencies in the Translation tool. I hope this makes sense to someone and we can work on taking care of this. Feel free to reply or email me at [email protected]. Thanks for reading. ItchyKneeSon -- 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.
