I was curious, so I googled to discover that there is indeed a large Polish community in Latvia.

So Google Translate did double duty: I received the translation, and I also received a mini history lesson.

‘it can probably get a lot of small sentence scale translation reasonably well done’

This week I’ll post a range of Thai sentences translated using Google Translate (these are the very same sentences I’ll check on in a year). Some came out ok, but others need the Thai touch.

I didn’t think about using Engrish.com to understand the errors, but it is a very good idea. On the course I took with Stuart Jay Raj (Cracking Thai Fundamentals), one class focused on why Thais pronounce English the way they do. We think of them as errors but for the Thais it is the obvious way to pronounce letter combos.

What we learned from Stu was indeed useful for me to know, as I then had a better shot at pronouncing English place names the Thai way. It is especially needed when giving directions to taxi drivers!

You can say Carrefour all you want the English or even the French way, but if you don’t say it the Thai way, you’ll never get to do that bit of needed shopping.

See, I knew there was a great social benefit! :-)

I don’t know enough Thai to know what you mean by inference based. But I guess with any language knowing context is all important.

At its best Translate can recognise patterns of words in sentences. So it can probably get a lot of small sentence scale translation reasonably well done. But it will not cope with long, complex sentences or paragraphs at all well, since it doesn’t really understand as a human does how things relate.

We all have a good laugh at the literal mistranslations by machines, such as “out of sight, out of mind” being translated as “invisible idiot”. This is the sort of thing I think Google Translate will become better at handling, because it’s a fixed phrase, an easy pattern to spot when it’s used repeatedly.

It’s when translation requires more than statistical pattern matching it will fail. Or the people who do the stuff on Engrish.com for that matter…

Even though it is for fun, Engrish.com is interesting to look at and think about causes of the errors we see there. Learning languages is hard work, but fascinating.

I’ve added the gadget to WLT to see how it works (you can see it top right). Oddly enough, it does not have Thai.

WLTs stats say that a number of people are reading WLT using translators, so this might help (from western to western anyway).

If you read further down in that Google Page, you’ll read that you can also drag a translator link of choice to your browser’s toolbar to operate from there.