Tofugu Comments - Latest Comments in Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Willy K. — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:16:12 -0000

Those online translaters suck at translating German too. But if you translate something from english to german to russian to japanese to spanish to english, you get a nice poem.

Problem with this German company could may be that a lot of spam mails are translated by automated translation into german, so the company probably thought the mail was spam.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Kaz — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:31:40 -0000

Yeah, ALL online translators SUCK.

There is this awesome story...my mom tried to use an online thing so she could write to the company that made her favorite drink...but they were German....and MAN was it screwed up (we checked it later). She never got a reply from them because they couldn't understand a word she'd written. They probably thought she'd had too much of their drink.

I won't go near those thrice damned things.
Thats why I'm LEARNING Japanese. Don't need bad translators when you know the language yourself.

Thanks for actually posting this article though. People need to be put off those monstrosities.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Amanda — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 16:12:18 -0000

I've been studying for 3 years now, and highly recommend the following setup:

- firefox + rikaichan extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/...
- www.jdic.com
- goole translate (english -> japanese), for common words which are hard to find on jdic.com. Check your result against what rikaichan says the word means.

Mostly note the use of rikaichan. It's an extension where, if I turn it on, I can mouse over kanji and get the definition.

I haven't needed to buy a dictionary yet because of these tools.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Matthew — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:14:19 -0000

Great article.
Spot on, too.
The only time I'll use a translator is if I don't know the meaning of a particular word.
I would never trust a translator to translate a whole paragraph, sentence etc.
These blogs have inspired to continue my Japanese studies.
Thanks again,
Matt.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Erin — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:14:29 -0000

Meg:

Thank you! That's really sweet.

As for typing in Japanese here are the steps:

Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages > Details > Add

Add Japanese. Make sure that IME Standard shows up as one of the keyboard options. Hit ok, and then you should be able to type in Japanese. To switch from English to Japanese, press shift + alt. You should see the language bar (at the bottom of the screen) change from ENG to JP. I would suggest (if you've never written in Japanese on your computer) to right click anywhere on the bar and choose "Restore the Language Bar". Now, hover over the icons on the language bar so that you can see what they are. Do the following:

Input Style >> IME Standard
Input Mode >> Hiragana
Conversion Mode >> General

You should be able to type in Japanese now. To switch back to English, just press shift + alt again. I hope that helps; if you're unclear on something, shoot one of us an email or something, ok?

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Meg — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:12:40 -0000

Oh man, I have no idea how to type Japanese characters on my computer! O_O Is there a way to do this after the eastern language support pack is installed on windows? Holy cow, I must know this because I'd rather be writing in hiragana, katakana and....maybe some kanji. I am horrible with kanji. >_>;;;;

This is a great article Erin!

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

theblip — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 23:18:28 -0000

I've heard a saying... "Online Translators translate from Japanese you can't read into English you can't understand" or vice versa... :D

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

David — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:02:33 -0000

Lol, Momotaro-kun xD

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Manuel — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:48:32 -0000

This is such a nice post, cause it says what i basically tell everybody. And of course not only about automatic translation to/from japanese. And i know, what i am talking about. I studied Computational linguistics. That are the folks, who, among tons of other things, try to make a computer understand the concept of any language and the concept of language in general, so that it can be able to translate. Knowing what i know, i know the current limitations and what a mess the programms are that are out.
Language is our brains main thing and so it might take some thought about linguistics to understand what a mindboggling hard thing it is. Lots of concepts in each language are extremly ambivalent. And computers hate ambivalence.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Eungi — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:44:04 -0000

lol! That's so true though! Just tweaking the words a bit can change the entire meaning so fast

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Rin — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:56:24 -0000

I loved this article. Haha, when I first started learning Japanese I'd often go the the translators for help translating things into English and it never worked. T-T I may sound old fashioned, but I prefer a good old hold-in-your-hand look-it-up-yourself dictionary over the online ones, even the tiny pocket dictionaries work alright.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Erin — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:05:39 -0000

Lord Voldemort:

No, it's some random internet person's :{

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Lord Voldemort — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:45:04 -0000

I knew that online translators kind of messed up the translations, but I didn't know it was that much. Thanks for the info. And by the way... is that your pet hedgehog? It's so cool!

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

chi — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 09:21:39 -0000

クリストフアー,
Ah,no i feel free . thanks for your message ..n_n..

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

クリス — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 05:36:32 -0000

@ Chi

Dont worry, I was just kidding. I only said that because I was comparing it to the examples Erin gave in the article. If you were offended, I apologize.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

chi — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:22:27 -0000

クリストフアー,
nope wrote by my self , not by any translators . i feel free if u can say why u think like this(like it too much mistake/funny,,,???) ,yeahh really my english still bad, not well..
　どうもありがとう。
　　　　　　　　　　チー

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Chimiko — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:54:04 -0000

Koichi usually the one that writes articles related to language right? Interesting that Erin wrote this one.

I very rarely use online translators for translating paragraphs and/or sentences. Before I found WWWJDIC (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html), I just used them for the occasional verb and/or noun that I didn't understand. Now, I use WWWJDIC for romanization of names and kanji, translations of paragraphs, and searching for words on Keitai..

Never trust translation sites like Google and Babel Fish... Unless you need a laugh... Here's somewhat sort of an example from my blog: http://nldream.endless-hope.net/2007/11/18/%e5%....

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

nick — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:10:47 -0000

If a japanese friend sometimes uses them when you speak in english with them, it's good to know the common mistakes of the online translator so u can actually make sence of what they say.... 2 wrong can make a right

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Nick — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:08:34 -0000

I remember i wrote about these translators in the mixi thing. I think a lot of people have used online translators before and the only good use they are for like if you need to know what a kanji in an a web site or a simple sentence. But even then they can get it right. Ive known they don't get Japanese to English right but didn't know until about a few weeks ago how badly they messed up other languages! Even latin based languages!

Thanks for listening to me!

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

frychiko — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:34:27 -0000

@ Cristopher! - I don't know if it's deliberate but there's a typo in yer name....

I think anyone past the beginner stage will soon give up on online translators (because they suck) so the problem solves itself. I remember using them way back when.

I am surprised not to see any mention of Rikaichan...!

http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/

If you do online translation/reading on a regular basis YOU NEED THIS.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

クリストフアー — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:15:46 -0000

@ ^^^

It's because he has the panda hat...

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Erin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:08:44 -0000

Viet:

I mean, I understand no love for me, but extra love for Koichi? No fairs.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

Viet — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:07:01 -0000

No love for Erin.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

koichi — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:52:27 -0000

@Brett
Haha, yeah, I was going to say, I didn't write this article, our esteemed writer Erin did. Nice comment though, I'll have to check out that site.

Re: Japanese Online Translators: They Laugh at You

クリストフアー — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:24:11 -0000

@ Brett

Erin wrote this article... (-_-) Koichi FTW! hehe jk.

Another solution could be that you actually just learn the language so you can pretty much say anything you want without having to find it on the web.