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Mac OS X  |  Business / Productivity  |  Word Processing  |  Translation Service  |  Snake Oil

Translation Service

Translation Service

service for translating text in any app

Version:  1.2.8

   [ Views: 1014 ]

Snake Oil

Feedback Type:  Review

Contributed by: tchambon1 Monday, July 17 2006 @ 10:39 AM PDT

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: Less than a month

Recommend Product: NO

So this thing uses resources from Systran or similar services that claim to provide machine "translation". Let's get real! Except for a few very narrow applications, so far no machine has been able to provide reliable translations. These systems do not provide translation, but merely blind word-swapping.

Basic illustrations: as of today, if you try to translate "Safe for children" into French, the system spits out *Coffre-fort pour des enfants* ("Safe to lock children in"). And "no preservatives" is rendered by *aucuns préservatifs* ("no condoms", together with a ridiculous grammatical error)
And thanks to Systran and the rest of them, these ridiculous phrases actually find their way on product packaging made in various English-speaking countries.

All that machine translation business is pure snake oil that has been successful only at ripping off individuals who don't know much about languages, as well as each and every one of us through sales to government agencies and to publicly traded companies...

  
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Comments

1 comments |

Snake Oil - Gene van Troyer

Yep. About the only use for this is as a single word look-up. Rest assured, you will be screwed if you try using it for phrases of two or more words.

It is rather shocking that these outfits haven't figured out that they need large glossaries of set phrases and idiomatic expressions.

Even more amusing is that anyone with OSX already has this built in, in Sherlock, where it has thes same level of unreliability.

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Tuesday, July 18 2006 @ 02:17 AM PDT