Reliable Online Full-Text Translation

Question

Hello All,
This is a general query and not to do with Kwizbot particularly.  I've just this morning begun to write a daily journal in French and wish to check it's English translation.  I just used a well-known site, R*****o  (just in case one cannot name names) and was very disappointed in the translations. For example, 'petit-dejeuner' resulted in 'little-lunch' instead of 'breakfast' :-(  And if I had taken it any further? I shudder to think!
To my question: does anyone know of a reliable service that can deal with large tracts of text?
Thank you for any suggestions,
Colleen

Accepted Answer

Hi Colleen,
machine language translation is a hot topic of research and by no means a cut-and-dried field. There are several approaches some of which work better in some contexts than others and vice versa. The upshot of this is that there is no perfect machine translation service and you are liable to get hideous answers next to perfectly fine suggestions. You, and the readers of your journal, will be disappointed if it was simply a machine translated text.
That sad, I find Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/?hl=en) quite good and capable. Again, you won't get satisfactory results all the time.
But, hey, if it were that simple that any ol' machine could do it, what's the point in learning a language yourself? ;)
-- Chris.

Answer

Thank you, Chris. Nice bit of philosophy there and underscores our impatient and unrealistic expectations of machines. We take it for granted that it's all there, ship-shape, and eminently correct.
Thanks for the Google Translate ref and I'll now wend my way over there and see if it is an improvement.
All best,
Colleen
ps: to really scare yourself re AI, bots, etc, take a look at 'Black Mirror' series on Netflix, if you haven't already. Twilight Zone plus!

Answer

Yes, Google Translate is certainly a step up. Thanks again, Chris.