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The trick is not to rely on Google translate for a finished translation, but to use it just as a tool toward reaching that goal. As someone who is learning Fre
by pen2l 7y ago
The trick is not to rely on Google translate for a finished translation, but to use it just as a tool toward reaching that goal.
As someone who is learning French these days, it is an absolute boon.
One of my favorite things is letting Google auto finish a sentence.... because those auto finished sentences usually tend to be phrases or constructs French speakers use a lot.
The other neat thing is that Google shows a check mark near a translation which it feels with high confidence is good — in my experiences those translations really are good and without fault.
- asaph 7y ago> The trick is not to rely on Google translate for a finished translation, but to use it just as a tool toward reaching that goal. This assumes the use case is a translator fluent in the source and target languages translating a passage. The far more common use cases for Google translate are people with near-zero knowledge of either the source or target language and little chance of completing the task successfully.
- andrepd 7y agoHe addresses that: >Let me return to that sad image of human translators, soon outdone and outmoded, gradually turning into nothing but quality controllers and text tweakers. That’s a recipe for mediocrity at best. A serious artist doesn’t start with a kitschy piece of error-ridden bilgewater and then patch it up here and there to produce a work of high art. For somebody learning a language, they would be even more easily mislead.
- Mathnerd314 7y agoIt's faster than using a dictionary to look up words one-by-one, and Google's actually integrated a dictionary into the interface. And beginner sentences are well-represented in the corpus so they're relatively unlikely to mislead. Using Google Translate for learning a language could be likened to using training wheels on a bike.
- Jamwinner 7y agoThe training wheels dont randomly fall off of bikes. Either a great analogy counter to your point, or a terrible one.