A project of mine - NiceTranslator

[TumbleN]

Hi all,

About three weeks ago I finally decided I was fed-up with the standard online translators that exist on the Web so I put together an alternative. It translates as you type and allows you to translate multiple languages at once.

I know there are a lot of people traveling and learning languages on the Pavlina forums so I thought it might be useful for some of you. You can find it at Nice Translator - The fast, easy online translator

I'm very open to suggestions and constantly working on improving it. Enjoy!

[Dan.Linehan]

Holy crap, that's impressive!!

What (programming) languages did you do this backend in?


Edit: I see you used the Google translator API -- well done.

[Lil Chris]

Damn that is cool... Nice job and site!!!

[Victor Vikingr]

I must say it's impressive!

There's one thing I think you should fix, though. There are two languages that are considered "Norwegian", bokmål and nynorsk. The one included in your translator is bokmål, so I think you should call it "Norwegian (bokmål)" instead.

EDIT: I would also love to see Icelandic included, any way you could do that?
EDIT 2: I noticed something weird while playing around with it; when I write "do", the German and Spanish words are right (tun & hacer), but the French one says "ne" instead of "faire". I suppose it's got something to do with "do not ..." and "ne ... pas". It's the only mistake it's done yet, as far as I know.
EDIT 3: I've found some words don't match when translated back and forth, which isn't surprising, since it only lists one meaning of each word. That said, if the user knows the language s/he's getting the output in, that shouldn't be much of a problem. It's quite good at translating sentences!
Edit 4: An important part of learning a language is to learn how to tell people your name. The Swedish "Jag heter *name*" becomes "My name *name*", without verb. There seems to be a lot of confusion, so this is a great program that should be used with care.

My rating would be:

The third best word-by-word translator I've tried (at least for French, which is what I've been working with the most).
The best sentence-by-sentence translator I've tried (for French also).

Bookmarked it, and I will tell people about it. This will be useful for my studies of Japanese next year!

[Annabelle]

Sounds good, TumbleN. But I couldn´t find Spanish. Are you adding it?

[Thomas H]

That's really cool!!

[Victor Vikingr]

Originally Posted by Annabelle

Sounds good, TumbleN. But I couldn´t find Spanish. Are you adding it?

The languages are listed alphabetically, so Spanish is number four from the bottom at the right side. At least in my browser.

[JimOfferman]

Love the site! Very clear and simple design... great job!

The Dutch/English translations, though, are practically useless. Like all other services out there, the individual words tend to be mostly correct but the grammar is way off.

"Secure the furniture and protect your belongings."

Translates to:
"Veilig meubilair en de bescherming van uw bezittingen."

But it should be:
"Stel het meubilair veilig en bescherm uw bezittingen."

It would also be grammatically correct to say:
"Beveilig het meubilair en bescherm uw bezittingen."
though no Dutchman would use that.

One thing that has always puzzled me about online translators is that they all fail the simplest of tests: translate a sentence from one language to another and then translate the output back to the original language. The result ought be a sentence that is (nearly) identical to your original sentence. Sadly, this doesn't happen in practice.

Another one that online translators haven't solved yet is the correct translation of proverbs and sayings. For example, English people say "apples and oranges", but the Dutch say "appels en peren" (apples and pears). It would be cool if translation services could account for such differences.

Until such issues are addressed, I see little practical use for online translators...