German translations

Hi,

Got an email from my cousin Wolfie in Germany and he was bemoaning the fact that it takes him so long to translate emails into English - sometimes days and weeks - and wishing that we had someone on each side who could translate emails for us once in a while.

Anyone know someone able to do this or have suggestions about how we could possibly do this ourselves?

Thanks in advance!

Love
Janie

There are web sites that you can use to translate German / English ~~~ English / German.

I never use them..., reason being that in any language some words can have more than one sense.

Example: Nut. The fruit of a tree; hexagonal piece of threaded metal; resident of the booby~hatch.

On~line translators use default meanings. However, they can be useful for getting, quickly, the general sense of a written passage.

Remember, though, that these sites WILL NOT produce the equivalent of well~spoken or well~written English or German, and may be fraught with unintended humor.

Infelicities of grammer by the writer in any language will be magnified by on~line translators to either the point of unintelligibility or hillarity.

They are completely useless with the informality of idioms such as, "Fuggeddaboudit!" etc.

Of course, they will be completely useless at dealing with spelling errors.

Here's the best FREE translation site I know of:

http://world.altavista.com/

Good luck.

Adam.



This message was edited Wednesday, Mar 26th 8:16 PM

Here is one more site.http://www.translation.langenberg.com/

For translating entire web pages, the Google link in Root's post is the best (free) one I've seen.

Barring that, the link I've offered above will provide the most context sensitive translation I've seen yet on line in German / English for free (my wife and I are fluent in both English and German).

When thinking about these things, remember that language is an informal system with fluid rules (especially English). An automated translator needs to reduce these informalities to a mathematical certainty in order to return a single meaning for each word submitted.

Add to that that there are nearly infinite contexts into which any given word can be placed, and you have a daunting challenge indeed.

Let's now take this one step further.

In some languages, the rules of grammer place the object in front of the subject. In other languages, the reverse prevails. In some languages verbs are compounded with nouns, while in others they are not.

Now, try to design a mathematical system (an algorithm), that returns the proper grammer no matter which way the subject and object are submitted in any language and make it context sensitive.

Sounds like fun, eh?

Adam.

Thanks a million, Adam and Rootdoctor!

This will really help us communicate. I haven't seen this cousin since his final trip to the US about 8 years ago. His English was pretty good then because he had been practicing with his mom, who married my father's brother in Germany...and had lived in Texas for a while. But now that he is back enmeshed in his native tongue he finds it very frustrating!

As for the algorithms that could make all this happen, it boggles my feeble mind!

Thanks,
Janie

Hello Janie..... If I can be of help, will gladly do so.
I was born of German parents that immigrated to the U.S.
(a long time ago). I keep in touch with my relatives regularly.

If you wish, you can e-mail me privately.

Hedy :-))

Another website to look at:

http://german.about.com/

I guess I wouldn't be of much help just at this moment but I am born German and speak the language still. Like you, I live in OH also. I would be more than happy to translate some things for you if you wish but I won't be online for another couple of weeks at home. Let me know if I can help :o)

flowox,

thanks for the offer!

Love
Janie

Janie, I'm back online so if you need some help, let me know :o)

welcome back flowox!

I'm waiting for his response to an email with a pic of us cousins.

: )

Then I believe I will take you up on your offer!!!

How kind of you,
Love in Christ,
Janie