Online translation services

[Hans S]

Following sucubos question I thought it would be a good idea to have a (sticky?) tread on automatic (free) translation services available online.

When I need something rough I use http://babelfish.altavista.com/ and it works most of the time,

I saw a collection of other tools here http://www.mezzofanti.org/translation/ but it seems that quite a few uses the babelfish. I have not tried the others.

If you want to have some fun - translate a text from language X to language Y and then translate it back to language X.

Cheers

Hans

[sucubo]

Thanks Hans, again, an excellent idea!

[Landser (bel)]

another very good site is http://www.worldlingo.com/nl/products_s ... ation.html

The only problem is that its in dutch but for the rest very good in translating complete sentences.

[Hans S]

I don't know if this one is good.

http://www.online-translator.com/default.asp?lang=en

Cheers

Hans

[Jon G.]

This translator is quite good:

http://translation2.paralink.com/

...it comes with a keyboard interface so you can translate from languages which use non-Latin letters, such as Russian, Arabic, Hebrew and Greek.

[R]

For Chinese, both traditional and simplified, this online dictionary is quite good, http://www.mandarintools.com/worddict.html and where it excels is in giving the pinyin (& tones) for all characters in a word - even when the dictionary does not contain that word, such as the name of a person or of a place. If your pc does not display Chinese characters, you can select it to output the result as an image instead.

[Jon G.]

There's a whole collection of translation engines assembled on one page here:

http://translation.langenberg.com/

There are also some language guessing engines on the page. Failure rate was an amusing 100% when I tested them, but they might be useful under special circumstances regardless.

[Hans S]

I'm quite impressed by Google http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en

Cheers

Hans

[Ken S.]

I'm quite impressed by Google http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en

Cheers

Hans

Here's an example for Google:

"So rueckte ich mit dem Korps am 30. August, begleitet von meinem Stabe, an dessen Spitze Oberstleutnant Heye stand, der mir waehrend des Krieges zum treuen Freunde werden sollte, voll begeisterter Siegeshoffnung ueber Czenstochau—Kalisch in Polen ein und ueberschritt nach leichten Gefechten am 3. September die Weichsel suedlich Iwangorod. Hier trat das Landwehrkorps in den Verband der oesterreichisch-ungarischen 1. Armee und blieb nun bis Ende 1917 unausgesetzt mit der oesterreichischen Heeresmacht in unmittelbarer Verbindung."

translation:
"So I moved with the corps on 30 August, accompanied by my rods, whose top lieutenant colonel Heye was, to me during the war to be loyal friends, full of enthusiastic hope of victory Czenstochau Kalisch-in Poland and exceeded light after battles on 3 September the Vistula River south Ivangorod. Here Landwehr joined the corps in the Federation of the Austro-Hungarian 1st Army and remained until the end of 1917 now unausgesetzt with the Austrian army power in the immediate connection."

Not bad, but a few significant errors...

[Dolmetscher04]

Not bad, but a few significant errors...

Just a few, Ken

I loved this one: "...accompanied by my rods"

Not to be overly critical, but you'd think the machines could do grammar by now

[LI995]

These are good resources. When you are dealing with military translations, nothing will do but a wartime dictionary, as well
as a good old 1939 Cassell's English-German and German-English. These I have, and do translation work for a modest fee depending on the material and time involved.

Also, if you are dealing with handwritting old German script, I can be of assistance in this area (e.g. Feldpost Briefe). Email through the site will reach me, mark it ATTENTION TRANSLATOR.