What's the best translator?

Leaving the final dot out would already be malformed input. But I was rather talking about putting the same kana in a hundred times and see what happens.

In your example Google translate doesn’t know these particular idioms or doesn’t try to use them for some reason. The grammar doesn’t seem too off :slight_smile:

This made me realise that I have not used Google Translate in ages and ages

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Or you could just use something like ichi.moe and you can reconstruct a better sentence without having to start from gibberish and reverse engineering an actual translation. Other than it not exactly recognizing 一杯ひっかけて as a conjugation of the phrase 一杯ひっかける, you can still put it together by knowing that 一杯 means drink (one of its primary meanings) and and then you look at the meanings of ひっかけて and seeing the meaning that says ‘[vt,v1] to drink (alcohol)’. The rest of the sentence uses the primary meanings of each parsed out part.

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I didn’t leave out the period at first. I was just pointing out how Google Translate will randomly decide not to translate part of a sentence if you leave it out. That’s pretty poor design that I’ll get only half a translation if I forget the period.

So again, backing up my point on why you shouldn’t trust Google Translate. Unless all you do is input overly literal, textbooky Japanese that has easy to parse out set phrase, you’ll get nothing of value. If I have to reverse engineer the sentence anyway, I might as well have just used a better tool from the get go. The dialogue in the manga I was using is nothing extraordinarily. It’s just conversational Japanese.

If I was feeding it Rurouni Kenshin dialogue or obscure net slang I’d understand it struggling.

Until we get true AI, machine translations should be taken with heavy heapings of salt.

Snarky… that’s putting it lightly. I feel bad for the poster, everyone probably knew precisely what they meant but took a bunch of reading to come across a legit answer. That’s the internet it seems, 5% legit stuff… 95% the other stuff.

I don’t see how it’s snarky to try to caution someone on the pitfalls of relying on an unreliable tool. Google Translate is a bad crutch to lean on. It seems to be much better to tell the person that straight up. Google Translate will often provide erroneous results so by relying on it you are learning and reinforcing bad information in your head. Especially if you ever try to use it for going English to Japanese.

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Oh yes, the actual question! I would get some already translated content (there are bilingual books, fansubs, lots of teaching material with example sentences, …), and then do the translation without looking at the Japanese solution.

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Well, it’s definitely better than google translate, but impractical in my opinion.
Using a book would require to be able to produce Japanese at that level.
Additionally, the English version is made to sound natural, not to match closely the Japanese. If OP writes something, checks again the original and, likely, finds it very different, how does that help them? At least, they will get to see some correct Japanese, so still better than google translate, but not great.
I do agree with @plantron and others that the best option would be to ask a native. I’d even go further and recommend to ask someone with teaching experience (could from italki, your local Japanese class, whatever). That person will be able to differentiate between plain wrong, unnatural and correct. They will also be able to provide one or even multiple correct translations if necessary and will be able to explain the grammar involved and so on. I feel this point is critical, especially at the beginner or intermediate level.

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A skilled human translator is best. In order to avoid having to hire one, choose some text that has already been translated by a skilled human translator, and then compare your work. For instance, the following books are on my shelf, and I can attest that the translation into English is skillful:

舟を編む: The Great Passage
コンビニ人間: Convenience Store Woman
日本語が亡びるとき: 英語の世紀の中で: The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Keep in mind, however, that skillful translators do not work one sentence at a time. There might be some combining, separating, or re-ordering.

Well, I just addressed the same issue in the message just above, but I guess it bears repeating. OP wants to write Japanese. If their Japanese does not match the original, how do they know if their sentence is correct (and what is actually wrong)?

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And this is why I expressed my concern. The OP didn’t talk about using GT as a starting point (which I would still argue is debatable as a good idea) but as a post translation check. If you are a learner you’re not gonna be able to tell when you are learning good information or something erroneous from these machine translators.

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Ah, whoops I mistook the direction. But I stand by my recommendation; choose some books that have been skillfully translated into Japanese from English.

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Google Translate is perfectly adequate, and sometimes even better than that, for understanding the gist of very simple language typical of form letters and basic travel information. It won’t act as a perfect translator in the sense that it can’t turn a Japanese form letter into an adequate English one, but you’ll understand what was said.

If you introduce any kind of nuance at all, its performance deteriorates rapidly.

So it’s important to know what its limits are, but it has uses.

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Isn’t that going to encompass quite a bit of writing? :sweat_smile: Certainly seems the case for nearly everything I try to read.

To give it some praise, I’ve found it can often be helpful for deciphering katakana loan words.

I know I come across as very negative, but it’s only because I actually wish Google Translate was as useful as I keep hearing people say. Yeah, if you’re translating a sign that says Mt Fuji or Shibuya Station, then it can be great, but I can read that without GT.

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Opp sorry didn’t mean to offend. Snarky is not in my repertoire so I had to look it up since this was my first time seeing the word. My understanding was snarky is a playful light term. Perhaps ironically google failed me on the meaning when I looked it up so you’re right on the money with that. On second look some other site is saying it’s an extremely offensive term so now I’m not sure what to think. I guess my prior comment has flip flopped depending on whether it is in fact strong to use.

Maybe I’ll just have to visit the English country that uses this word so I can get more familiar with its proper usage.

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It’s a small percentage of all Japanese material that can be translated decently, but it’s a large percentage of what the average person (on average, someone who doesn’t study Japanese) would need the tool for.

For people who want to see what an email from Amazon says, or what time their hotel check in is, it should be fine.

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Snark can definitely go both ways. Looking back I definitely took it too defensively. It’s all cool. :grinning:

I just want to sufficiently warn people as early on in my studies I got bitten too often relying on Google Translate. Often leading to writing ungrammatical sentences or getting corrected by erroneous translations that I tried to massage by relying on Google Translate as a checker too much.

That would be a good example of the trap I fell in to. A learner who is still shaky on how に and で are used differently could end of with bad understanding between the two when you see that they are both translated very similarly by GT.

Had the person in this HiNative post relied on GT, they could have been lead down the path of ungrammatical sentences:

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Yeah definitely in agreement there. GT is very unreliable even for simple sentences. I mostly use it for single words.

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Well, I don’t think anyone ever suggested GT to know about how to use grammatical particles, and it’s not like those two don’t mean very similar things when used about locations.
It’s a very bad argument, cause if someone is learning grammar from a translation, they were on a bad path to begin with, and it’s not GT fault that someone put in a sentence with bad grammar

It’s not about learning, it’s about checking correctness. So not only does @athomasm’s argument hold, I think it’s a great argument. GT should not be used for the purpose stated by the original poster.

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