anything better than google translate???

[HeDiWen何迪文]

Obviously, there must be. Is there anything I can use for a quick sentence translation that is more efficient than google translate? It get's so tedious trying to decipher google's broken translation. I would really appreciate it.

[tooironic]

A professional translator?

[chrix]

How about a good dictionary and a good grammar....

[gougou]

Obviously, there must be.

Just why is that? Because Chinese is so damn simple?

[c_redman]

http://babelfish.yahoo.com/ (used to be world.altavista.com). It's not necessarily better, but it will give you something different to consider. It's using SYSTRAN technology, which is a company with decades of experience in machine translation.

[baining tang]

I agree, use a good dictionary. nciku is a good online dictionary, you could at least check what you come up with there with the conversation area. An idiom search. Also there are FAQ about grammar and other things. There are also a lot of good tools with it like a vocab list you make yourself and flashcard generator.

http://www.nciku.com/

[Lu]

For words, I recommend nciku. For entire sentences, if the grammar is so difficult that you can't figure it out by yourself, then chances are a computer program can't either.

[Xiwang]

Supposedly, Google constantly uploads professionally translated documents along with their corresponding original texts into its database so as to improve the knowledge base upon which the translation program relies. The technology is probably as good as it gets right now for something that is free.

[buzhongren]

I use Cedict and Nciku for sentences. Each properly breaks down mono syllabic characters and poly syllabic words. In most cases it will still look strange and that is where your knowledge of Chinese grammar comes in. I see the one post where Googe learns from known translations. I dont see this in practice. I saw some software that based its translation on two or three million sentences. I think this a good approach. I do that myself to a limited extent ie I save the sentence and translation for use in my own Linux pattern matching using Regular Expressions. I also go through grammar books and save the English sentences so I can find the Chinese later.

[polaatx]

Hello,

My project requires translating a Chinese newsletter to English every few weeks. We would like to use software to accomplish as much of the work as possible before a human translator gets involved.

The Google translator at http://translate.google.com/# does well translating the words but not placing the words in the right order.

Are there other software (local or online) that would do a better job -- or is the inability to place words in the right order endemic to all Chinese-to-English software?

What is the most reputable Chinese-to-English software out there?

[889]

It turns out that Google Translate Chinese (Traditional) translates differently than Google Translate Chinese (Simplified). It's not just a matter of using different character forms in the translation. So if you're unhappy with one translation, you can always try the other.

(This is speaking of English > Chinese; Chinese > English seems the same regardless of character forms.)

[chrix]

That's good to know, after all, the two standards are not 1:1. Certain things are just expressed different across the Strait.

Any company that's trying to market to both sides of the Strait is bound to find out An example: my Taiwanese friends expressed bewilderment about the Chinese language interface of lang-8, it seems that they just copied the simplified version 1:1, and that just doesn't sound all that natural in all cases...