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Comment by yankcrime | Hacker News Reader

Here's his homepage: http://member.wide.ad.jp/%7Ewada/index-j.html

Google Translate version of an interview about the board's design: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&...

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I think this is the first time Google translate returned a coherent page.

Thanks.

Google Translate is very good for French, Spanish etc. A Google Latin America blog post that was on reddit was very readable, only about half-way through did you realise it was machine translated.

Pretty mediocre for German and typically terrible for Japanese and Korean.

In particular, German works well until it encounters a Separable Verb [1], at which point it gets very confused. I'm guessing that Dutch and Hungarian run into similar problems, based on the wikipedia page, but I don't speak a lick of either of those.

[edit]

Quick example: "Er kommt sofort an" (He arrives immediately ankommen == arrives) Is translated by google as "He comes up immediately" as "an" can be translated as up and kommen is "to come"; this is really basic stuff and comes up all the time. It is great whenever separable verbs don't come up but I have never seen it translate a separable verb correctly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb

I speak dutch and from my experience it can't get any more accurate. But of course since it's machine translated it tends to be extremely literal, and some context is mistranslated at times.

That's partially because Google Translate was trained using EU datasets. The EU produces thousands of documents every year that must be translated into each of its member languages. This means that Google Translate is very accurate when translating between them. The similarity in grammar also helps.

To clarify I was in speaking in context of the post, Japanese. I've personally witnessed the accuracy of their system as a native dutch speaker. Although it's the closest language to English, it still impresses me.

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