Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Coffeeprincess]

Which website do you guys use to translate Korean to English and English to Korean? I tested out the one on dictionary.com and it kinda sucks.

[jinks]

Lately, I have bringing up babelfish and getting my students to type in a pretty straight forward sentence in Korean; like 'I'm as happy as a king', then we translate the English version offered by babelfish (me because happy is king) back into Korean. The students see how ridiculous the "translations" are and begin to understand why I am so down on them when it is clear they have been using an online translator.
My favourite is the alleged computerised translation from English to Russian and then back into English. What came back as 'the meat is ok, but the vodka is no good' started off as 'the flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak'.
However; I do run some stuff through babelfish, last semester I put my Korean freshman student evaluations through. the translations were crappy, but I got an idea of whether the responses were positive or negative, that's about it. Recently I had to make up a room change poster and I wasn't sure what form of 'change' to use, so I compared babelfish and a paper dictionary and a pair of random students in the corridor. I got the right wording, but I wouldn't place my trust in a computerised translation alone.

[Hyeon Een]

The translators are usually worse than useless. If, for example, you are translating a sentence with a 요 ending it will come out as "bedspread", which is so wrong it's not funny. Korean has lots and lots of words written the same but with different meanings. This makes automatic translation next to impossible with current technology (I think you'd need a bright bi-lingual AI to get a decent approximation). If you try and translate something like a cellphone text message things get even worse because of the abbreviations used (나는 => 난 수업=> 섭 ...) the 'cute' misspellings (잘가요=>잘가용, ...), the slang/immature/retarded use of Korean (방가방가! 질! 안습 ㅠㅠ) and the habit of running the words together without spaces making it impossible to tell where one word ends and another begins unless you understand it already.

If you know some Korean grammar then your best bet is to just translate unknown words through the dictionary at http://dic.naver.com and look up unfamiliar sentence patterns in the grammar index of a good textbook. If you aren't able to do that, an online translator will probably be WORSE than simply not knowing what you are translating.

[stevie rotten]

Me the opinion is not right. It relays, thing different meaning me which am bitter in order the convenience to discover a translation by the Babelfish are provided and them try generally well general meaning with poetic to be joyful grudge all.

[jlb]

www.dictionary.com is another option. Better or worse than Babel, I don't know.

[skeeterses]

Hyeon Een has the right answer. If you want to translate something, the best way is to use the dictionary and try to learn some of the Korean language.

The answer why Web translators don't seem to work too well is a simple answer. The programming languages for the web, like Perl and Javascript are best suited for handling regular expressions. Real languages like Korean and English simply cannot be represented by regular expressions.