why google translate is not quite good enough

[Zoe Girl]

I am studying my French skills on my own in order to take a test showing that I could maybe teach French. I signed up for a news feed on facebook for French Info so I get French news 5 times a day. Now I am sitting down to translate those instead of just getting the general idea. I was working on an article about a football (that means soccer in the US) being suspended and it translated to the player 'hustled' the referee and then 'returned to the cloakroom'. In US English hustled can mean cheated out of money in one case but I think this means pushed him around physically near or in the locker room.

When I used google translate on a flyer I wanted also in Spanish for a family cooking class it almost said that they would cook with the children (as ingredients) instead of cook with the children (as a class). Super glad someone checks me!!

[SteveinMN]

As iffy as Google Translate is, Bing's is much worse. It often does not translate the negative in the original language, which completely changes the meaning of the phrase. And it does a very poor job with slang, translating with surprising frequency words with no expletive connection into the English word f--k. :0!

[Zoe Girl]

How funny, I will NOT use bing when I translate for my flyers and announcements. Over the summer I need to work on my Spanish but I am also studying French. I know the online translators can make me lazy,

[Jilly]

I love Google Translate. I like translating back and forth from English to another language. Fun, yes, but it occurs to me, writing this, that I have entirely too much spare time.

[ToomuchStuff]

Not sure how well these translators work with punctuation. And they tend to be very literal translations, so if one is translating garbage (misspelled, bad punctuation, etc), they get out garbage.
Like the old joke of Knowing your s..t, and Knowing you're s..t.

[iris lilies]

I love Google Translate. I like translating back and forth from English to another language. Fun, yes, but it occurs to me, writing this, that I have entirely too much spare time.

hey that is a good mind exercise and will keep you sharp, no shame in that.

[lhamo]

Google translate for Chinese is worthless. Seriously, they might as well leave it all in characters - it would be easier for most people to understand.

lhamo

[Kestra]

I was recently told by a bilingual person that Google translate is actually fairly good for English/French. Of course you'd want to have someone with a solid grasp of the language read it over before using the results. But it was interesting to know that it's a better site than some as we do do a lot of translating at work.

[Zoe Girl]

the last couple things I checked in french were better, why? because I made sure I used the special keyboard for the accents! Some things are probably words that are translated literally but may have a more common meaning and that makes sense as well.

When I have people check the Spanish translations (hablo 20 palabras en espanol) it is pretty good overall

[sylvia]

Je ne sais pas!