A few weeks ago I was helping a friend translate two college application essays from Chinese to English. The essays were about his travels around the world and they added up to 5,000 Chinese characters or so. He’d been to 40 countries and visited numerous scenic spots: the fjords of Sweden, Salamis of Cyprus, Santorini of Greece, the Bosphorus Bridge of Turkey… Many of the names were new to me, and under a tight deadline, I didn’t trouble to search them one by one. I copied and pasted the whole essay to Google translate and got a satisfying English version, which I would rate 6 or 7 out of 10. Then I corrected the grammar mistakes and trimmed some sentence structures. The essay was near perfect!
I hate to admit it but Google Translate has a bigger vocabulary than I and it’s strong in terminologies. It’s more frustrating to find that Google is able to do a better job than a translator.
For the time being, its weakness is in grammar. And the English to Chinese translation doesn’t work very well. But don’t worry. I won’t be surprised when one day Google translate replaces human translators.
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