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Old 1st March 2020, 05:01 PM   #37
David
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Nova Scotia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mickey the Finn
My experience with Google Translator has been more hit than miss. For Malay-English, I'd say it's worse than useless. Better to copy and paste any unknown Malay text and translate it as Sundanese, then Indonesian, then Javanese, and then you might have an idea of what it means. For English-Indonesian and the other way around: very, very good. Something like 98.28% of my Feisbuk friends are Indonesian, and none have ever voiced any suspicion that I'm Inggris bule, and not Indonesian. I straight up told one guy that I was using a translator to chat with him, and I had a hard time convincing him that I wasn't pulling his leg. Javanese-English is very hit-or-miss. A very big problem is G.T. doesn't have an understanding of different registers. And then there are terms like "Buta Nawasari/Naswari/Ngawasari"; I still don't know if it's Bengali or Hindi which I ought to translate from. Perhaps it's Balinized Bengali, and therein lies the problem. A while ago, some Balinese danganan name I tried to translate came up as something like "cousin does not know knee broken". The important thing is: for all translations, click the "reverse translation" feature to be sure it makes sense, and that words with more than one possible meaning are being translated into the meaning you intend. This can be tricky; sometimes you need to change the word order to correspond to the syntax of the target language. Sometimes the syntax of colloquial spoken English is incorrect syntax, which causes the translation to make no sense. Sometimes you'll need to use a synonym for the translation to come out right. Google Translator is my default tool to use for all the languages I need to translate from/to (Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, and Bahasa); only for Spanish do I sometimes need to use another as an adjunct.
Well Mickey, i am glad you are having some luck with Google Translator through what sounds like an extremely excruciating and convoluted method of multiple transition translations. Though i suspect that your Indonesian friends are either being very polite to you or it is THEY who are pulling your leg. I can't imagine that any native Indonesian speaker could be fooled by a Google translation into believing they are speaking to another native speaker though such translations.
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