Comments on: istartedsomething.com, now in 13 languages, powered by Microsoft Translator widget

By: Mike Bem

Mike Bem — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 09:34:36 +0000

I too have to join the others. The Polish translation was extremely entertaining and I had a good laugh but then again it had nothing whatsoever to do with the original text and failed to convey even the general messages. Apart from working in IT, I happen to be an occasional translator and one thing that automated tools will always lack is the ability to understand a given text, something crucial and irreplaceable.

By: wojtekmaj

wojtekmaj — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:30:53 +0000

Automatic translations will be a piece of shit for a looong time since now. Unfortunaetly.

By: Antonio

Antonio — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:15:51 +0000

Hahaha, so they are automatic translators or automatic fun generators?

By: tom

tom — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:58:56 +0000

yeah… just tried the German and Spanish translations as well. Sorry to say but the German translation is pretty much useless. I don’t see how people can say they get the meaning of an article. Just try the Windows Mobile Marketplace one in a translated version.

Even funnier though are the translated comments.

By: Tobbi

Tobbi — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:12:38 +0000

I also tried the german translation. Truely, it is a little bit funny

By: Antonio

Antonio — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:45:35 +0000

Its nice but still is not quite right. In the example image posted in english it says “MIX09: Windows Mobile 6.5 shows more polish” and in the spanish translated version says something like “MIX09: Windows Mobile 6.5 shows more fingernails”.

It will be an awesome time when those tecnologies finally get to their best level.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:38:38 +0000

Great idea, but the translation (tried German) is the worst I have seen in a long time. There are various web sites that offer machine translation, and I think pretty much all of them are way better then the quality of this translation. Brilliant idea but currently unusable.

By: Tee

Tee — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:24:16 +0000

The Microsoft Translator can’t translate contraction to Chinese
hope they can fix it

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:43:35 +0000

Well… The russian version of this page looks funny For example, “this is great” has a sence of “IT is big” And so on…

By: Quikboy

Quikboy — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:33:28 +0000

Neat, it’s almost instant right on the page!

Of course, the most of the translations seem rather rough. Perhaps they should hire some linguists for a day to help fix some of the grammar and syntax? Or start up some user-volunteer project where people can give suggestions to help make translations a bit more clean? I’d love to see a more perfect machine translation someday.