On 4/19/2012 11:26 AM, Victor Manta wrote:

Somewhat senseless slogans do not mechanically translate very well.
For instance, Google translates the grammatical but silly slogan
Hot rocker Pedro rocks
to the supposed Hungarian
Hot rocker Pedro sziklák
Real helpful to a Hungarian who does not know English ;-)

Newpaper headlines also get squeezed to fit in limited space.

A good example, many thanks. The translation of the same into French
gives: Hot bascule roches Pedro. Pierre and Blaire, among others, will
surely appreciate.

For those who are aware of the basic ideas that stand behind Google
Translate, it can be useful (for example by eliminating some typing)
but, as the French maliciously say, Ã* consommer avec modération (consume
in moderation - translated by Google).

Translate works pretty well for single words; look up the most common
equivalent. It also, in my experience with Spanish to English,
translates idiomatic phrases and literate sentences pretty well. I
believe it uses statistics even more than 'ai understanding', with an
important part of the training set being dual language (human
translated) documents composed of more or less formally correct sentences.

tjr