The Russophile has put together a comparison of the top free online Russian translation services, pitting his own human translation against offerings from Babelfish, Google, and World Lingo.
Unsurprisingly, the computer translations are no match for the best that humanity can offer, but I was impressed nonetheless by their quality – a massive improvement on a couple of years ago. It’d be interesting to see how far ahead of Babelfish, et al the professional translation software is, or whether the stuff you can get online for free is as good as it gets for now.
By the way – if you want to see some really bad machine translation of Russian text, check out Copydude’s article – Achy Breaking News.
- What next?
Stumble it
Digg it
Save to Delicious
Leave a comment
Subscribe
{ 4 comments }
I am honored to be featured in your blog. I thought that they were reasonably good for making a quick read of a news article. “UGO of chaves” had me laughing hard. “Collaboration on building S” was also funny — it sounds like a university campus building rather than a space station.
I don’t think that we can ever expect on-line translators to be perfect (or even human translations for that matter) especially in Russian because the vast difference in sentence structure.
I will probably try this again with some other online translators and different articles in a few weeks. It was worth a laugh or two plus at least this round of testing solidified my favorite choice.
I was born in Russia so I speak Russian, but the service I use is located on http://translation2.paralink.com/
it’s way better then most other sites I have found.
Russia meanings for various words are very difficult to translate at times so one must really know the language.
Thanks Rurrik for the suggestion, I will add that service to my next test. By the way, since I originally creatd the review, I added a fourth service, PROMT, to the review.
My favorite “bad russian” example, a review of a computer game: http://eng.gameguru.ru/articles/articles/neverwinter_nights_review.html
For individual words, I use lingvo.ru a fair bit. They have a registry hack for IE that allows you to right-click any Russian word and get a popup translation. Handy if you are compelled for whatever reason to use IE.
Sig
Comments on this entry are closed.