Google Translate or Bing Translate? What're your druthers?
Our illustrious (and highly sensitive feminist) West Coast correspondent, Signora Thalia swears by Bing. "Really, dear," she insists, "you simply must bing. All other translation apps are subpar." You go, girl! La Thalia reports that when she compares the results of entering Korean text into Bing with the results of the same text entered into Google, Bing wins hands-down.
At first I thought that was true of French also. I seemed to be getting more plausible translations from English to French in Bing, but then discovered that if one highlights a questionable word or phrase in Google Translate, the program lists several alternatives that relate to the context of the sentence or different shades of meaning. In many cases I've been able to drill down to the exact translation I was looking for.
Here is the same English sentence translated first by Google Translate:
Je ai vécu en Floride depuis plus d'un an.
Then by Bing Translate:
J'ai vécu en Floride pour plus d'un an.
I think you need the 'depuis,' but the only way I'd be confident with either of these translations is to ask a Frenchwoman.
Of course, the problem is that sometimes, you simply don't know which is the more appropriate translation. This is why nothing can beat a real live person to analyze your needs and present you with the best translation. Perhaps with future technology such as intuitive robotics, it will be possible to make translating software understand exactly what you mean by detecting intonation, subtle voice modulations, deep context,etc. Until that brave new world approaches, though, the reliability of online translators is far from perfect.
Big blizzard on the East Coast, but not sunny Florida. Here are the French, Spanish, and Italian words for 'blizzard.'
French: tempête de neige.
Spanish: ventisca
Italian: bufera di neve
I like the Spanish 'ventisca' best, don't you?
One thing I've found it useful to do is to 'back translate,' to coin a phrase. Have Google come up with a French translation, for example, but then just take part of the translation and see if Google translates it again in the same way. Recently, I asked Google (or Shoogle, as she's now being called in some circles) to translate into French the sentence 'the boys are up to no good.' The result looked odd to me, so I took the French that supposedly corresponded to 'up to no good' and stuck it back into the translating machine. What did I get? "à rien de bon"--now translated as "to no good." Leaving out the English idea of 'being up to' clearly bankrupt my original sentence of its intended meaning, not to mention its tongue-in-cheek tone. Now we must try this little experiment on Bing.
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