This is an entry for the steemit blog mini challenge #1.
Google translate is the translation software I use. I use Google Translate for the following uses:
- To translate posts written in other languages to English so I can read them.
Here is an example of a post written by @oldstone in Chinese.
With Google Translate, I can easily translate it to English and read like this.
- I use to to translate my comments from English to other languages so I can comment on all kinds of post.
Pros
Google Translate is very easy to use and I use it on both my PC and my Android mobile phone. It is free on all platforms.
It is available on the windows store for windows PC and on the Goolge Play Store for Android phones.
You can also access it directly on their web platform. Just visit translate.google.com to get started.
As seen in the screenshot above, you can just paste the text you want to be translated in the first input box. If you do not know the language, The system will automatically detect the language for you. Isn't that awesome?
Next, you select the language you want to translate to in the second window and then it will process everything in seconds.
Another advantage of using Google Translate is that it is very quick. It can translate a whole page of an article in less than 2 seconds.
In fact, a human translator cannot compete with the speed nor, as a result, the quantity of translations that Google Translate is able to perform. In an average workday an experienced translator can translate about 2,000 words maximum (300-400 words/hour) depending on the difficulty of the text. In contrast, Google Translate is able to produce a translation with the same number of words in just seconds.
Problems
Some of the problems I face with using Google Translate is that:
- Google Translate often produces translations that contain significant grammatical errors. This is because the translation system based on language pair frequency that does not take into account grammatical rules.
- Google Translate does not have a feedback service to report translation errors. Other translation software I have used like King translate have a system where I can report errors in the translation and this will be corrected by the developers. Google Translate does not possess this feature.