A little help with translating to French?

[pugs]

Hi,

I've received a short PM in French and was able to translate via Google, but I'd like to translate an answer back, but I have no knowledge of French! I barely speak English well.

Help!

Thanks,

Pugs

[plantsnobin]

You might want to pm canadamike, he can help you.

[PatrickW]

I don't have any experience translating into French, but Google language tools is very good with translating things into Dutch, and pretty good with Spanish. It does sometimes make mistakes, but it's almost always at least understandable. A good way to test it is to translate what you are saying back and forth, and if you get something that comes back to you nearly the same as what you wrote, it's probably okay.

One of the most common mistakes Google language tools makes is dropping the verb. If your technical English is good enough to know which words are the verbs, you might check to make sure these are in the translation.

There are other translation tools on the Internet too, and you can try using one of these to compare the results with Google.

Another way to verify short phrases, is to type them into the Google search engine, and see how frequently they are used on the Internet. If you find a page that has it, you can use Google to translate this page into English and see if the context it's used in is good.

We are really very close to being able to use Google or other computer programs to converse in other languages on the Internet. The age of the Star Trek universal translator is almost here...

Almost forgot, one more thing. Make sure you start with a message that's written in proper and clear English. Garbage in, garbage out!

[canadamike]

send it to me my friend, I'll take care of it fast

[pugs]

Thanks for all the offers. canada Mike, I'll PM you.

Thanks everyone!

Pugs