Apart from Babelfish and WorldLingo, can anyone suggest a good and, most importantly, accurate website tranlator.
Google Translate is pretty good. They have their own translation engine which might give you different results than the SYSTRAN based sites.
I would like to hear the impression of our international friends as how they receive these letters that make use of these translators. I always fear that my letters will end up offending a family member or sounding like a Monty Python sketch.
Odd. I was going to say not Google Translate. Whenever I put in Spanish terms that I hear all the time, it returns the Spanish term to me as the translation. Here is an example:
Input: sierra
Translation: Spanish » English
sierra
Maybe everyone at Google understands the Spanish term and thinks it stands on its own, but if I already understood it, I wouldn't be asking for a translation! I have commented back to Google Translator several times about this, but it still happens. I just ran it to get the above example.
Tim
PS - In my opinion, the correct translation of the above would be mountain range.
Nuances, yes, that is what online translaters just cannot convey. And accuracy is something you'd better not expect, either.
I am a translator myself, and among translators, the fear of online translators making professionals jobless has been around ever since computer translations came up. But that fear is unfounded, computer generated translations nearly always make me laugh.
hmmm
could it be you're meaning to type "cierra" which is usually a command telling someone to close somethings. For example, "cierra la puerta" would mean "close the door."
No. I meant to type "sierra", as in Sierra Nevada, meaning the Nevada Mountains. This has happened with at least two other words, neither of which I currently remember. I can find one of them, though, it was from McCarthy's book, All the Pretty Horses. He used it so often I tried to look it up on Google Translate and, again, it responded with the Spanish word as the English translation of the Spanish word.
Tim