Language Translation Sites?

[marcusmarcusrc]

What site do people currently use for language translation? (I still default to babelfish.altavista.com but there may be other, better places by now)

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

Is there such a thing as a good translation site? I've never found babelfish to be at all useful, in that if I can't translate something in French, it can't either...

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I don't think there are any translation sites that translate better than someone who *does* speak the language. But babelfish might translate German better than you do, or French better than *I* do. :)

[desireearmfeldt]

I bet my German grammar is as good as babelfish's. It better have me beat for vocab. :)

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

I pretty much use babelfish for vocab. On rare occasion, I'll let it at full sentences in languages I really have no idea about. Recently it helped me decipher the portuguese wikipedia entry on "Simaika" (my grandmother's maiden name) so that I found that Simaika means fish, more specifically as in the miracle of the "loaves and fishes".

[ilai]

Occasionally if you Google and find a site in a foreign language, it'll have a link giving you its machine-translated version. But I don't know if that's any better than Babelfish.

[gnibbles.livejournal.com]

rikai is awesome for japanese translation, but 1) you have to know some japanese already and 2) the site has to actually be in japanese. *cough*

[shumashi.livejournal.com]

Babelfish, usually, but not for large sections of text. I haven't found anything that does that well.

Though I do have a translation dashboard widget for my Mac. Good for the random word here and there.

sadly...

[puffy-wuffy.livejournal.com]

i still use babelfish, so i can't help...but i felt like commenting anywayz...

[avacon.livejournal.com]

I also still use babelfish out of the same habit as many other people here. ;)
If I'm translating to a non-English language,
I always make sure to translate its output back into English
as a sanity-check.
I've sometimes used google's but I can never remember its URL.