But just to clarify, my intention in writing the original post was to discourage people (who are learning Spanish) from using machine translation as a reliable tool that can improve their Spanish. There are some people who think they can do their Spanish homework by typing their statements in English into Google and voilà! presto, change-o, out comes the homework, totally done, just as if they had put it in a microwave!

Just like how food that is zapped in a microwave often doesn’t taste as good as slow cooked food, students who rely heavily on machine translation shouldn’t expect the results to make them sound like real native speakers. That’s all I was saying.

Machine translation can give good results. Many companies use machine translation successfully. For an evaluation of machine translation, see http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation.html.

They ken do absolutley nothin with peeps who speel like Tarzan.
(Ken absolutley que hacer nada con peeps que speel como Tarzán)

…see?

Tarzán has an accent?…who knew?

At least for Spanish to English I find them fantastic. I can always fix the mistakes…and sometimes having a slightly convoluted definition of a word is OK I think ( it’s what we did as kids…you just get more context eventually and fix it.)

I like Google format because you can print out (or cut and paste into word) in a nice Right/Left 2 column format…like a bilingual book. Use “landscape” page orientation.

To paste into word: Table > Insert > Table> columns =2. Then paste each language separately and add spaces here and there, to line up the paragraphs. Fix the English if you want.

Print out and read away! Highlight the unfamiliar words. Then look at the English and try to translate back to Spanish.

I’ve leaned a butt-load of vocabulary this way (and also idioms, which Google seems to better than the more literal others.) Yeah, Tarzan speech is always a danger if you translate to your non-native tongue. But avoiding this tool is like refusing to use a calculator.
Me hate sliderule!

(BTW butt-load is a respectable word…and it doesn’t mean ‘culata de carga”…maybe “carga para tres burros”?)

In relation to the dating of the Internet, the situation to simiiar somebody happened that I know. The first two email were English normal, probably because they were short and generic, and then guy’ the email of s obtained to the sonar progressively more strange peraltado and. Appeared that the individual knew enough English to falsify it through the email initial but on the other hand it had to resort to the automatic translation and to copy and to stick sweetened lines of poetry that it found in line. Ick

@CostaRossa, regarding internet dating, simiiar situation happened to someone I know. First two emails were normal English, probably because they were short and generic, and then the guy’s emails got progressively more stilted and weird sounding. Appeared that the guy knew just enough English to fake it through the initial emails but then had to resort to machine translation and copying and pasting sugary lines of poetry he was finding online. Ick.

Now in mangled Spanish from FreeTranslation.com:
“Con respecto a internet que fecha, situación de simiiar sucedió a alguien yo sé. Primero dos correos electrónicos fueron ingleses normales, probablemente porque ellos fueron cortos y genéricos, y entonces el tipo correos electrónicos sonar conseguido progresivamente más forzado y raro. Parecido que el tipo supo justo que suficiente inglés para falsificarlo por los iniciales correos electrónicos pero entonces tuvo que recurrir traducción automática y copiando y pegando líneas azucaradas de poesía él encontraba en línea. Ick.”

Personally, it still helps me to communicate with the clients with whom we do not have any languages in common – at least I translate the text and the little knowledge I have of a couple of other languages and the intuition usually do a decent job and the corrected result is better than putting the client off by forcing him to do the same in English or rather language – he would have to resort to google anyway…

Google is so on target and intuitive with its other services [search engine, Gmail, Adsense, etc.] that it’s kind of embarrassing to see them offer a product like Google Translate that is, at best, mediocre.

Also, it’s funny when people mention this “experiment” to take a sentence, translate it into Spanish and then translate it back into English using an automatic translator. I did this same experiment using human translators and while the final result wasn’t as bad as the automatic translator, there was a considerable difference between the original text and the final result. So don’t hate on automatic translators too much.

For even *better* (read: more humorous) results, successively translate your text into a few different languages along the way before getting back to English.