In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
See what you meen. I had a look at the website earlier that you suggested re:ballet and karate and when I opened it obviously discovered it was all in Italian.
I have now however translated my question on bablefish and emailed. If I get a reply and can then translate that back the site has been most usefull to me. I agree of course you wouldnt use this sort for tool for important documents but for requesting info from websites and not speaking any Italian at all this is going to be of great help to me in the future.
Unfair!
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 05/20/2005 - 12:10In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
What Neil has done is not quite Kosher. When translating from English to Italian, one receives an approximation, at best, then when one takes this rough translation and translate it back to English you get what Neil demonstrated. In other words, the second approximation turns into "gooble gook".
I have translated a number of long paragraphs from English into Italian, and they always turned out pretty good. Although my verbal Italian is limited, I can read the language very well, since I speak and understand more than one language.
In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
I can't disagree with you FrancisM since what you are saying is true - retranslating/untranslating will always result in weirdness.
But, picking a random article online through google.it/news I find that:
"Sciopero mezzi pubblici" gets translated as "Strike average publics" which is also gobbledy gook and completely incomprehensible without context.
Reading on:
"Bus, tram and metropolita of firm today for a strike of eight hours of the proclamato local public transit from the labor organizations Filt Cgil, Fit Cisl and Uiltrasporti. To the center of the protest the will of the controparti, Asstra and Anav, of disdire unilaterally, from the first next june, l'attuale economic treatment of the period of disease of the public-transport workers."
Overall it's just about comprehensible, so as I stated in my first posting - babelfish is great for gist, but I wouldn't touch it for anything legal etc.
In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
I've used babelfish and the underlying software Systran for a few years now. It's handy for Italian to English, but I wouldn't rely upon it for English to Italian. This for example is its rendering of the following:
[COLOR=Red]Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
[/COLOR]
[COLOR=DarkGreen]In means of the cammin of our life
I found again for a dark forest
ché the straight one via smarrita.
[/COLOR]
[COLOR=Black]Which Longfellow translated as:[/COLOR]
[COLOR=Navy]Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.[/COLOR]
Which is why I don't trust babelfish to translate into Italian. It can save a great deal of time helping me to scan Italian websites, as can the translation facility in Google. But the potential for misunderstanding if relying on babelfish to communicate with an Italian is huge.
In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
In means of the cammin of our life
I found again for a dark forest
ché the straight one via smarrita.
You what!! Translation from english to english please. Some of us are working class you know.
I'll I want to use bablefish for "where is the nearest plumber?"
Another example in favor of English to Italian
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 05/20/2005 - 21:36In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
[QUOTE=lotaresco]
[color=navy]Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.[/color]
[/QUOTE]
I used the same software, translating the foregoing into Italian, and here is the result.
"La via centrale sul viaggio della nostra vita I trovato all'interno di un'oscurità della foresta, dato che la via diretta era stata persa."
I think this result is better than the Italian to English translation. What say you?
I translated the Italian back into English using Babelfish so you can judge the standard of machine translations for yourself:
For those of you it is appreciate that it has Italian is limited to the greatings only, I hardly have uncovered a Web site that will translate English to Italian to the release of a key and it pours of approval. Latta the all the Italians have left to know it if exact it. The place is babelfish.altavista.com. That is the relative translation of this text.
Seriously though, Babelfish is fantastic when you want to get the gist of an Italian website or piece of text - but you have to be careful when you use it for anything serious e.g. to translate contracts and so on.