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Here are two warnings that I received about the website translation program.
I wrote to my family in Norway using the translation.  I also sent them a
copy of the English letter that I wrote.  Now I don't know if they are
rolling on the floor laughing at my Norwegian letter or if they actually
understand what I said.  I speak Norwegian, but I cannot spell it.  To my
Knowledge, most of it made sense, but some of the grammar did seem different
that if I were speaking it.  Of course, my Norwegian is about as good as a
six year olds.  I hope they won't be to kind to let me know.  Here are some
of the possible pitfalls of this technology.  I think it is still worth a
try, if one uses very simple English sentence structure.

Might be a good idea to check your 'English to second language' translation
by having the program to translate that translation back into English, just
to make sure it's actually saying what you think it says...Lots of idioms out
there & the natives are quite amused with some of errors that happen in
translation (and g.f. is not even in that equation...).

Having lived abroad, and having tried to make myself understood in
face-to-face conversations, I made many mistakes.  Translation from one
language to another is difficult, and almost impossible by machine.  For
example, I asked the website to translate "I'm a white gluten intolerant
person" into French, and got "Je suis un gluten blanc la personne
intolerante".  Asking the site to translate this from French to English gave
me, "I am a white gluten the intolerant person."

When I asked it to translate "Fruit flies like bananas" into French, it said
"Le fruit vole comme les bananes."  This came back into English as "The
fruit flies as the bananas".
The program can't distinguish between adjectives, nouns and verbs when the
words are spelled the same.

The way to check whether the program has understood what you intend to say
is to ask it to bring the translation it makes back into English.  I think
you will see that the results are not very satisfactory.  I wish it were
simple, but it is not.

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