@cosullivan @brandon Yeah. Google Translate *can* produce surprisingly good translations... but it needs to be operated by someone who natively speaks the language being translated into so they can recognize and adjust for cases where it trips over something.
@ssokolow @cosullivan natively as in it’s their first language or as in already speaks enough of the language to know something doesn’t look right?
@brandon @cosullivan Most of the time, the latter will do but, sometimes, going a little further toward the former is necessary.
Google will occasionally throw something at you where you get the gist but have to recognize the equivalent idiom or turn of phrase in the destination language to make it feel natural to the way a character speaks.
A more mild example would be having Google give you "such a girl" when it needs to be "a girl like that".
@brandon @cosullivan *chuckle* I remember seeing the discussion of that here.
Anyway, Google Translate does have a few other quirks that need to be massaged. I'm not sure whether I mentioned it in another branch of this thread or elsewhere, but I'm compiling a guide for what I'm learning while dogfooding an experimental Tesseract OCR frontend I've been cleaning up to push to GitHub, intended for OCRing manga and the like
(It was a sleep-deprived rush experiment, so it needs refactoring first)
@ssokolow @cosullivan Definitely agree with that sentiment. Idioms are difficult when it comes to translation as there's often an underlying meaning that's not explicit.
A blog post by our instance admins used the phrase "enough in the kitty" but I can imagine how poorly that may translate to other languages.