Thread: Translator link
View Single Post
  #3  
Old May 07, 2007, 11:01 PM
celador celador is offline
Ruby
 
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 99
celador is on a distinguished road
Well, if you made a translator as good as this Tomisimo database it would be a good one. So I hope you will.

I was happy to find this site because being able to search a word or partial spelling, from either language (without being hassled over accents) was a brilliant idea.

True enough the translators have serious problems sometimes, but by going back and forth and tweaking the phrases in both languages, I was usually able to get it to say the same thing going from one back to the other eventually. Using the Tomisimo thesaurus made it so i could pick a word that seemed to be the best usage. It is an exhaustive process sometimes, but probably no better experience for learning grammar and vocabulary.

But that was the reason I joined your forum. Because you have to have some quality input on what might be more idiomatically correct. There are things/meanings etc. that just will not translate literally. But it seems to me that unless you understand the literal translations even of some of the idiomatic phrases, you'll never really understand how they derive.

Maybe what we need is a Phrase Tomisimo too. lol

Translators are pretty good at gleaning the meaning of a foreign phrase (usually) but they really suck at composition or trying to structure your sentence in a language you don't know very well. The poem i posted,
"Sorry I Looked" was translated from English and then worked back and forth into what I posted. Gave it my best uneducated guess.

This is the very reason I am interested in some native (or more knowledgeable) input.
Reply With Quote