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French to English generally works rather well because they have similar sentence structure (except for inverted adjectival order) and neither has a lot of long-
by Vivtek 13y ago
French to English generally works rather well because they have similar sentence structure (except for inverted adjectival order) and neither has a lot of long-distance dependency stuff. Even Systran kicks ass on French to English.
Where FR>EN fails is vocabulary. This text, as you see, is really basic terminology, nothing technical. The French categorize things very differently in technical texts sometimes - to the point of despair for the translator. Google tends to do OK on that to a point, then fail in alarming ways when you least expect it.
- TheCraiggers 13y ago"then fail in alarming ways when you least expect it." That's basically the M.O. of all completely automated systems though. Especially when concerning non-trivial things like language translation. Stuff like that requires intelligence in many cases to choose the right word based on the context and information the speaker is trying to communicate.
- raphaelj 13y agoFrench grammar is very similar to the English's one. A text translated "word for word" to English from French, using the later grammar, will almost look readable. Strange but not really wrong. Most errors will be from an over-usage of perfect tenses ("I have visited" vs "I visited") and wrong superlatives ("most fast" vs "fastest"), as these are the biggest differences between the two languages.