Translation services

I was wondering how accurate the online translation services are. At present I can really only take their word for it or translate English->German->English (for example), and that always causes problems in the double translation.

So, if anyone is willing to help, could they post something in their native tongue (providing it's not English) so that I can test them out?

If you want to test something the other way then try converting:



into your language then post which service you used and your findings, does it make sense, is it complete rubbish etc..

german:
wie repariere ich windows 2000 da es beim ersten mal nie richtig lädt.

Hmm, if that's the German version of that sentence then, translations go as:

Altavista
as I repair windows 2000 it with first time never load correctly there.

http://www.freetranslation.com/
Like I repair once never correctly loads windows 2000 there it in the first.

dictionary.com
as I repair windows there 2000 it with first time never correctly load.

Systran
How I never repair Windows 2000 there the first time correctly loads.

PROMPT's online translator
How I never repair Windows 2000 there the first time correctly loads.

So which do you prefer? And would anybody understand them if you simply used a translator to post on this page?

they are all quite bad compared to the input

none of these is your original sentence, no?

dictionary has the one that is the closest to the meaning of the sentence (the "never" needs to be in the sub-clause, not the main clause!)

but this all sounds very funny to me

fyi: i am a native german speaker.

can you please post the translations of your input sentence into german? then i can tell you if any could be understood by a german (also: by a german speaking english and a german NOT speaking english)

[edit]
also: i think i forgot a comma (we just got new rules for writing that i am not used to...) before the "da". maybe this helps the programs to analyze the sentence structure... (i doubt)
[/edit]

something else to think of: a less technical sentence could give better results. i translated "load" to "laden", but actually the anglicism "booten" is used....

The German that comes from the sentence:

Altavista
Wie ich, reparieren Sie Windows 2000, wie es nie scheint, richtig das erste mal zu laden.

http://www.freetranslation.com/
Wie macht ich Fenster 2000 repariere, während es nie scheint, richtig das erstes Mal zu beladen..

dictionary.com
Wie ich, regeln Sie Windows 2000, wie es nie scheint, richtig das erste mal zu laden.

InterTran
Wie ausführen ICH ansetzen Fenster 2000 als es nie scheint zu beladen korrekt die erstemal.

PROMPT's online translator
Wie, befestige ich Windows 2000, wie es nie scheint richtig das erste Mal zu laden.

Couldn't get Systran so used InterTran instead, provides a very interesting comparison though.

You are asking too much, use those translators only for single words.

uuuuhhhuuhahahahaha.

i love the one with "fenster 2000"

I would get the sense from all of them, but i am used to the english language and translations... this is too funny! give any of these to a pc-newbie and he will sell his pc immediately!

I may be asking too much of them, but some say that they will translate a whole web page or other file. Some are even trying to sell their services, so if they're not up to scratch then presumably their entire service isn't up to scratch.

i wonder if there is any software to do this task? should not be too hard to make it better than these...
maybe using neuronal networks or something to make it "learn" by watching a human translate something...
human languages also consist of kind an algorithm. grammar can be translated in a machine-parsable form (like spelling correction software - even MS Word would probably have done 100 times better...)
but i don´t have the time right now to do some after-hour project

I'm guessing it's so that you don't use the ree service and pay for the professional one. Accidentally getting it wrong.