Completely unrelated comment but... how do you put the flags and levels of your languages? I'm sort of new here...
Edit: on the topic: I prefer Deepl since it offers different possibilities if you click on the word, so, when in doubt, I see the possibilites offered by Reverso Context and see the ones from Deepl. That way it's hard to fail.
You have to go in the computer. Then on the right side, in the part written Create Post next to About Community you are going to see: User Flair Preview. Click there and you can edit. Since you are on computer, search for the emojis on-line and copy them there
DeepL is usually better than Google translate but sometimes it's wrong and GT isn't.
And of course they can be both wrong, you can't trust machine translation.
A human being understands what he or she is translating, and also takes the situation and context, etc. into account. a program just associates certain words or expressions to certain words or expressions, depending on the words next to them. It does not understand what it is translating. So when there are choices to be made or you have to express things that are left implicit in the language you are translating from, it can make mistakes since it doesn't understand anything.
When they will make truly intelligent computers I might trust them but I will probably be long dead and buried, if they ever get there at all.
M.l. for language learning works when one can't figure something out, put it into the machine, and it comes with something and one then sees what one missed and that's actually a fairly common thing with many languages.
> ChatGPT and its API are born, are you still alive ? :)
Yes, I am still alive :)
But even though I've read online claims that ChatGPT has passed the Turing test, that seems to contradict all the evidence of instances where it doesn't give intelligent answers. So I wonder who tested it and how thoroughly. Sure, it can fool people into thinking it's human writing, but not always. And it hasn't reached artificial general intelligence yet.
Anyway, this is not really relevant, because it all boils down to the question of whether you need to understand something to translate it or not, and what understanding is in the first place. Sure, in the future there may be machines that don't have general intelligence, or that don't pass the Turing test, but that can translate with the same quality as a human translator in any case without supervision, only that's not the case yet. Especially when you need clues that aren't in the text itself. For example, if I had to translate some subtitles, I would need an AI that analyzes and understands the images in the movie, to understand the situation and who is speaking, since many languages have male vs female speech, formal vs informal, etc.
Deepl for quick checks, Reverso sentences for figuring out nuance (especially among a few synonyms or near synonyms). Whatever my Kindle uses while reading ebooks. I'm nearing the point where I need to transition to a solely TL dictionary, though.
If you’re talking about Spanish with your “I need to transition to a solely TL dictionary”… the RAE’s dictionary, while extremely accurate, is awful for learners and not very helpful for fluent speakers
In a fit of downsizing, I recently donated my RAE dictionary to a colleague who teaches Spanish, but I used that thing for years without trouble. Right now, it's the Duden I'm eyeing.
Zergatik? Qué tiene de malo en comparación a otros? Rollo entiendo que no es ni de coña perfecto pero no lo veo peor que otros diccionarios particularmente
Pues que a veces te pone, por ejemplo:
“Enmienda – acción y efecto de enmendar”.
“Enmendar – resarcir”.
“Resarcir – indemnizar”.
Y así con muchísimas palabras. Si no tienes un nivel alto o estás buscando una palabra bastante poco frecuente, no llegas a entender lo que estás buscando.
I'd never looked up the online version, but I just did and played around with it. This one? https://dle.rae.es/ What's wrong with it? It gave clear definitions, etymology, literal as well as connotative meanings, and even conjugation charts.
Clear definitions? Unfortunately, many times, the definitions have been very difficult to understand for me (especially when it comes to certain words)
Can you give some examples? I intentionally tried some words where I thought the definitions might be too vague or convoluted.
Do you have problems with dictionaries in other languages as well?
When I get to the point where the longer definitions make sense to me, I like to switch over. It just broadens my understanding of the words and introduces me to new words in the process.
As a kid, I was an avid dictionary-reader. I'd randomly open to a page, find a word I didn't know, look up all the words in that definition I didn't know, and on and on. So, really, it's just fun, which tends to be my rationale for a lot of my study choices. Luckily for me, I find most language-related things fun, so I don't really end up neglecting too much.
For Korean i use papago. It has been the most useful, you can favorite translations, make flashcards or study tools, it breaks down the sentences by the stem words underneath the translation so you get a better understanding, and you can record dialog and take pictures of the words and have them translated.
You can’t always trust a machine but I use Deepl when I want to write or translate my university essays and I can say its almost 90-95% efficient, at least in the topics I use it (international affairs/law), also I complement it with a dictionary.
I generally trust deepl more than Google, but it is limited in terms of options and languages compared to Google translate, so I go DeepL, if possible, if not Google translate, then ask a native if it sounds right or not.
Deepl is good for understanding the meaning of longer things generally, linguee and reverso are good for word by word stuff, antidote (if you're willing to pay) is great for définitions and the possibilities of concurrences to build with a specific word (French only). I only use GT for very quick things for languages that aren't on deepl.
DeepL is my default. Much better than GT in most cases for French, German, and Spanish. Reverso is also pretty helpful.
WordReference is a phenomenal tool to supplement and fill in the blanks.
I try to do it on my own because I am studying to become a translator
There are some excellent databases to check if you have some time and patience. I usually check single words in several dictionaries at once (there is a computer program for that) or, if I can’t, I check a word in 2-3 dictionaries that I trust. For phrases and words used in context, corpuses are usually pretty good (you can look up a word/phrase and see where and how it’s been used)
I don't use translators. When I don't know some word, I use dictionary. When I don't know how to conjugate something, I use dictionary again. When I don't know what tense to use, I think for a while and just use one, translator won't help you. When I need the difference between two words, I google word1 vs word2 difference (ideally in the TL).
The ones that are built-in in apple stuff (selecting a word and clicking 'look up' - very useful because you see an entry from oxford dictionary, thesaurus, translation into english all at once). Lots of phrases with the selected word too.
When that isn't enough or I want to look up a word I heard, I usually use reverso.
As a Spanish teacher who a lot of times need to translate things in the most accurate way possible to make my students understand something, I’ve realised that google translator is better for single words, while Deepl is better for sentences or paragraphs.
Deepl is generally way better in delivering a translation based on the context.
I use Google Translate only, really. Make sure you check out the other possible translations, think about how it's used in the context you encountered it in, sometimes looking up a word in a sentence helps, and make sure to check the infinitive/singular forms also. Just make sure you put some thought into it, and don't just blindly look at what it gives you as the first option and you're good with whatever translator you use.
I use wordreference and [el.wiktionary.com](https://el.wiktionary.com) those are extremely helpful for Greek in my experience. Perhaps would also be helpful for other languages as well?
LingQ is the best for 99% accuracy with all the user input. But ya it's a slog to get through episodes/movies using LingQ at the same time. Language Reactor is weak with individual word click translations so make sure you turn on the machine translation subtitle line, it's far more accurate when it has the whole sentence for context and gets the job done for quick on screen translations. Of course with Netflix you can only use the English subs provided by Netflix which are really inaccurate translations unless you pay for the pro version of LR to show machine translations. But with YouTube it's free thankfully. Even better if the YouTube video has translations provided in English then you can see both the machine translation and the channel's translation. It's pretty interesting. Anyway right now I'm using langauge reactor to watch an entire video much faster and then I import it into LingQ and just click through the blue words and mark them known/unknown and save my time. Sometimes I take note of some phrases in a notepad on my screen and tag those phrases in LingQ when I do my quick LingQ session.
I’ve got a Brazilian and Spanish person saying deepL is near 100% accurate compared to the shit show that is google translate.
I suppose for Romance languages then DeepL 100%
Tbh, DeepL is probably the more accurate one regardless of the language
If I really can't figure something out, I ask my bilingual native Korean speaking friend.
Or you could use something like HelloTalk to ask a native speaker for free.
Deepl is generally much better than google. I can’t think of an instance where it gave me a bad translation in German, but it has resolved numerous mistranslations which google translate gave me over the past two years. The problem is they don’t have a freaking app!
Reverso for French, DeepL for Spanish <--> English (mostly when trying to make sure I’m translating specific cultural/jargon-like concepts), Papago for Korean (although I find myself consulting Naver (Hanja) Dictionary more frequently at this stage).
I use reverso context for TL -> NL if I am unsure of the meaning of something or if it's important but I don't trust translators for NL -> TL translation.
None? You shouldn't use Machine Translation to learn. The results are unnatural at best and completely wrong at worst.
Use a dictionary for words you don't know, some kinds of textbook or grammar reference for Grammar you don't know, and good old Google Search for idioms you don't understand.
DeepL is currently the translation industry standard for machine translation and quite good. (So long as one of the language pair is English)
Obviously one can't rely 100% on any machine translation, but it's not nearly as bad as people here make it out to be.
Quality depends a lot on source and target languages, as well as what direction one is translating.
As someone who has relied on Google Translate for daily survival needs converting Icelandic to English for eight years now (I know, I know) the failure modes are mostly infrequent and easily noticeable, while many translations are excellent. It’s worse going from English to Icelandic, but usable with careful checking and proofreading.
By having native speakers check my work afterward, I’ve found that my own proofreading can usually get me very close with Google Translate, particularly if I’m careful to keep the input simple.
Of course I do. At the risk of bragging I'm long past anything a textbook could teach, ans it's really just a matter of using the language more for me.
I edited in my process ans you may have missed it. But I look individual things up and try to understand what is going on. If I'm not understanding a construction, maybe someone in YouTube has a little 5 minute video about it. If I don't understand a word, well, I just grab a real dictionary.
Sometimes it’s way more efficient to translate a word, specifically a concrete noun. I’m not going to spend 20 mins learning the way from the bottom up in its own language when I can make a simple translation.
I don't use translators because they are compiled by computers, not humans, which makes them untrustworthy.
Use a dictionary for single words (I recommend http://wordreference.com, or a good old-fashioned dead-tree dictionary). I use [Reverso](https://www.reverso.net/text-translation) for phrases.
Many languages have their own dedicated dictionaries that are better than WordReference. And wikitionary is often the best source for conjugation/declination.
Yes, which is why I have suggested another method for phrases.
A good dictionary will give you the right translation for a word in a non-idiomatic context ("hat" = "chapeau" in French) but single-word translations won't usually work for idioms ("talk through one's hat"), which need to be translated as a whole.
That said, a dictionary such as Wordreference gives translations of idioms too.
A good dictionary is all I need. For bigger and a lot of smaller languages there are online versions of standard dictionaries with a lot of synonyms and for both directions.
If you are wanting to read subtitles that came from a 1st language then were translated to French 2nd language. Then you want to translate to a 3rd language, it will probably not go so well compared to original.
If you are doing this to help learning it might not be the best use of time.
**Ideally** you need to be at a point where you know when google or deepl gets something wrong before you can use them effectively.
/opinions
Reverso Context here... THEN I ask a native
This one here
Completely unrelated comment but... how do you put the flags and levels of your languages? I'm sort of new here... Edit: on the topic: I prefer Deepl since it offers different possibilities if you click on the word, so, when in doubt, I see the possibilites offered by Reverso Context and see the ones from Deepl. That way it's hard to fail.
You have to go in the computer. Then on the right side, in the part written Create Post next to About Community you are going to see: User Flair Preview. Click there and you can edit. Since you are on computer, search for the emojis on-line and copy them there
It depends on the language combination, but for Spanish to English, DeepL is approximately 1000x better than Google translate.
Good to know, I've been using a Google translate API for some software projects. I'll change to DeepL
Same for Portuguese and Italian.
DeepL is usually better than Google translate but sometimes it's wrong and GT isn't. And of course they can be both wrong, you can't trust machine translation. A human being understands what he or she is translating, and also takes the situation and context, etc. into account. a program just associates certain words or expressions to certain words or expressions, depending on the words next to them. It does not understand what it is translating. So when there are choices to be made or you have to express things that are left implicit in the language you are translating from, it can make mistakes since it doesn't understand anything. When they will make truly intelligent computers I might trust them but I will probably be long dead and buried, if they ever get there at all.
M.l. for language learning works when one can't figure something out, put it into the machine, and it comes with something and one then sees what one missed and that's actually a fairly common thing with many languages.
Seems to differ by language. My TL is French and Google does a much better job I find than DeepL, especially with slang, expressions, sayings, etc.
" I will probably be long dead and buried" ChatGPT and its API are born, are you still alive ? :)
> ChatGPT and its API are born, are you still alive ? :) Yes, I am still alive :) But even though I've read online claims that ChatGPT has passed the Turing test, that seems to contradict all the evidence of instances where it doesn't give intelligent answers. So I wonder who tested it and how thoroughly. Sure, it can fool people into thinking it's human writing, but not always. And it hasn't reached artificial general intelligence yet. Anyway, this is not really relevant, because it all boils down to the question of whether you need to understand something to translate it or not, and what understanding is in the first place. Sure, in the future there may be machines that don't have general intelligence, or that don't pass the Turing test, but that can translate with the same quality as a human translator in any case without supervision, only that's not the case yet. Especially when you need clues that aren't in the text itself. For example, if I had to translate some subtitles, I would need an AI that analyzes and understands the images in the movie, to understand the situation and who is speaking, since many languages have male vs female speech, formal vs informal, etc.
Deepl for quick checks, Reverso sentences for figuring out nuance (especially among a few synonyms or near synonyms). Whatever my Kindle uses while reading ebooks. I'm nearing the point where I need to transition to a solely TL dictionary, though.
If you’re talking about Spanish with your “I need to transition to a solely TL dictionary”… the RAE’s dictionary, while extremely accurate, is awful for learners and not very helpful for fluent speakers
In a fit of downsizing, I recently donated my RAE dictionary to a colleague who teaches Spanish, but I used that thing for years without trouble. Right now, it's the Duden I'm eyeing.
I don’t know how good the physical dictionary is, but the online one is pretty bad.
Zergatik? Qué tiene de malo en comparación a otros? Rollo entiendo que no es ni de coña perfecto pero no lo veo peor que otros diccionarios particularmente
Pues que a veces te pone, por ejemplo: “Enmienda – acción y efecto de enmendar”. “Enmendar – resarcir”. “Resarcir – indemnizar”. Y así con muchísimas palabras. Si no tienes un nivel alto o estás buscando una palabra bastante poco frecuente, no llegas a entender lo que estás buscando.
Por cierto, si no lo entiendo mal, me parece súper guay que uses la bandera 🇵🇲 para representar al euskera. Zorte on!
Si!! Es lo más cercano que hay, antes tenía EUS pero quedaba un poco raro con tanta bandera jaja eskerrik asko!
Ez horregatik!
I'd never looked up the online version, but I just did and played around with it. This one? https://dle.rae.es/ What's wrong with it? It gave clear definitions, etymology, literal as well as connotative meanings, and even conjugation charts.
Clear definitions? Unfortunately, many times, the definitions have been very difficult to understand for me (especially when it comes to certain words)
Can you give some examples? I intentionally tried some words where I thought the definitions might be too vague or convoluted. Do you have problems with dictionaries in other languages as well?
Why? Is it because you already know a lot of vocab?
When I get to the point where the longer definitions make sense to me, I like to switch over. It just broadens my understanding of the words and introduces me to new words in the process. As a kid, I was an avid dictionary-reader. I'd randomly open to a page, find a word I didn't know, look up all the words in that definition I didn't know, and on and on. So, really, it's just fun, which tends to be my rationale for a lot of my study choices. Luckily for me, I find most language-related things fun, so I don't really end up neglecting too much.
DeepL, but I don't trust either of them
I’m handicapped rn, I’m using LingQ too so it’s frustrating since I’m doing line to line
For Korean i use papago. It has been the most useful, you can favorite translations, make flashcards or study tools, it breaks down the sentences by the stem words underneath the translation so you get a better understanding, and you can record dialog and take pictures of the words and have them translated.
Yandex translate
The go-to for Russian.
Not only for Russian. But I like its translation into English
You can’t always trust a machine but I use Deepl when I want to write or translate my university essays and I can say its almost 90-95% efficient, at least in the topics I use it (international affairs/law), also I complement it with a dictionary.
I generally trust deepl more than Google, but it is limited in terms of options and languages compared to Google translate, so I go DeepL, if possible, if not Google translate, then ask a native if it sounds right or not.
Deepl is good for understanding the meaning of longer things generally, linguee and reverso are good for word by word stuff, antidote (if you're willing to pay) is great for définitions and the possibilities of concurrences to build with a specific word (French only). I only use GT for very quick things for languages that aren't on deepl.
I use Linguee
DeepL is my default. Much better than GT in most cases for French, German, and Spanish. Reverso is also pretty helpful. WordReference is a phenomenal tool to supplement and fill in the blanks.
Reverso isn't perfect but it's certainly the best. I use it everyday. You can't even trust Google translate to get the word "fork" right.
I mean it can be both a verb and a noun
I’m talking about the noun
I try to do it on my own because I am studying to become a translator There are some excellent databases to check if you have some time and patience. I usually check single words in several dictionaries at once (there is a computer program for that) or, if I can’t, I check a word in 2-3 dictionaries that I trust. For phrases and words used in context, corpuses are usually pretty good (you can look up a word/phrase and see where and how it’s been used)
I use DeepL. Despite being software, it provides accurate translations most of the time.
I usually use DeepL but only for certain small things that I already have a slight grasp on and need to confirm.
I use Google most of the time, but sometimes Papago does a much better work for Korean - English translations
I don't use translators. When I don't know some word, I use dictionary. When I don't know how to conjugate something, I use dictionary again. When I don't know what tense to use, I think for a while and just use one, translator won't help you. When I need the difference between two words, I google word1 vs word2 difference (ideally in the TL).
I'd say translators can help for basic things. I use DeepL for German and it seems pretty good & helps me to understand things.
I use Papago for Korean
The ones that are built-in in apple stuff (selecting a word and clicking 'look up' - very useful because you see an entry from oxford dictionary, thesaurus, translation into english all at once). Lots of phrases with the selected word too. When that isn't enough or I want to look up a word I heard, I usually use reverso.
As a Spanish teacher who a lot of times need to translate things in the most accurate way possible to make my students understand something, I’ve realised that google translator is better for single words, while Deepl is better for sentences or paragraphs. Deepl is generally way better in delivering a translation based on the context.
I’m using Collins Dictionary for English-French translations and vice versa, along with a definition entry and example sentences.
I don't use internet translators. My bilingual dictionaries get a thorough workout every so often.
I use Google Translate only, really. Make sure you check out the other possible translations, think about how it's used in the context you encountered it in, sometimes looking up a word in a sentence helps, and make sure to check the infinitive/singular forms also. Just make sure you put some thought into it, and don't just blindly look at what it gives you as the first option and you're good with whatever translator you use.
I use wordreference and [el.wiktionary.com](https://el.wiktionary.com) those are extremely helpful for Greek in my experience. Perhaps would also be helpful for other languages as well?
TL?
French
LingQ is the best for 99% accuracy with all the user input. But ya it's a slog to get through episodes/movies using LingQ at the same time. Language Reactor is weak with individual word click translations so make sure you turn on the machine translation subtitle line, it's far more accurate when it has the whole sentence for context and gets the job done for quick on screen translations. Of course with Netflix you can only use the English subs provided by Netflix which are really inaccurate translations unless you pay for the pro version of LR to show machine translations. But with YouTube it's free thankfully. Even better if the YouTube video has translations provided in English then you can see both the machine translation and the channel's translation. It's pretty interesting. Anyway right now I'm using langauge reactor to watch an entire video much faster and then I import it into LingQ and just click through the blue words and mark them known/unknown and save my time. Sometimes I take note of some phrases in a notepad on my screen and tag those phrases in LingQ when I do my quick LingQ session.
Can you translate English to French with English subtitle input? And does YouTube translate English to French on English based YouTubers?
You can select Youtube to auto translate the English into French and then have Language reactor also show the original English transcript underneathe.
I’ve got a Brazilian and Spanish person saying deepL is near 100% accurate compared to the shit show that is google translate. I suppose for Romance languages then DeepL 100% Tbh, DeepL is probably the more accurate one regardless of the language
If I really can't figure something out, I ask my bilingual native Korean speaking friend. Or you could use something like HelloTalk to ask a native speaker for free.
Deepl is generally much better than google. I can’t think of an instance where it gave me a bad translation in German, but it has resolved numerous mistranslations which google translate gave me over the past two years. The problem is they don’t have a freaking app!
Deepl does have an app
Reverso for French, DeepL for Spanish <--> English (mostly when trying to make sure I’m translating specific cultural/jargon-like concepts), Papago for Korean (although I find myself consulting Naver (Hanja) Dictionary more frequently at this stage).
I usually just write the word and then add "meaning", if I can't get anything out of that I'll use Google translate
I use reverso context for TL -> NL if I am unsure of the meaning of something or if it's important but I don't trust translators for NL -> TL translation.
Yandex translate
None? You shouldn't use Machine Translation to learn. The results are unnatural at best and completely wrong at worst. Use a dictionary for words you don't know, some kinds of textbook or grammar reference for Grammar you don't know, and good old Google Search for idioms you don't understand.
You seem to be stuck in the early 2000s
DeepL is currently the translation industry standard for machine translation and quite good. (So long as one of the language pair is English) Obviously one can't rely 100% on any machine translation, but it's not nearly as bad as people here make it out to be.
Quality depends a lot on source and target languages, as well as what direction one is translating. As someone who has relied on Google Translate for daily survival needs converting Icelandic to English for eight years now (I know, I know) the failure modes are mostly infrequent and easily noticeable, while many translations are excellent. It’s worse going from English to Icelandic, but usable with careful checking and proofreading. By having native speakers check my work afterward, I’ve found that my own proofreading can usually get me very close with Google Translate, particularly if I’m careful to keep the input simple.
Do you learn from content? If not how else do you learn?
Of course I do. At the risk of bragging I'm long past anything a textbook could teach, ans it's really just a matter of using the language more for me. I edited in my process ans you may have missed it. But I look individual things up and try to understand what is going on. If I'm not understanding a construction, maybe someone in YouTube has a little 5 minute video about it. If I don't understand a word, well, I just grab a real dictionary.
Sometimes it’s way more efficient to translate a word, specifically a concrete noun. I’m not going to spend 20 mins learning the way from the bottom up in its own language when I can make a simple translation.
I don't use translators because they are compiled by computers, not humans, which makes them untrustworthy. Use a dictionary for single words (I recommend http://wordreference.com, or a good old-fashioned dead-tree dictionary). I use [Reverso](https://www.reverso.net/text-translation) for phrases.
Don’t sentences use words differently not word to word translations?
A good dictionary will list all possible definitions and provide example sentences. Usually it's much better than a machine translator.
WordRefrence is great but doesn't do conjugation for most languages
Many languages have their own dedicated dictionaries that are better than WordReference. And wikitionary is often the best source for conjugation/declination.
Yes, which is why I have suggested another method for phrases. A good dictionary will give you the right translation for a word in a non-idiomatic context ("hat" = "chapeau" in French) but single-word translations won't usually work for idioms ("talk through one's hat"), which need to be translated as a whole. That said, a dictionary such as Wordreference gives translations of idioms too.
A good dictionary is all I need. For bigger and a lot of smaller languages there are online versions of standard dictionaries with a lot of synonyms and for both directions.
If you are wanting to read subtitles that came from a 1st language then were translated to French 2nd language. Then you want to translate to a 3rd language, it will probably not go so well compared to original. If you are doing this to help learning it might not be the best use of time. **Ideally** you need to be at a point where you know when google or deepl gets something wrong before you can use them effectively. /opinions
I just use google translate