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by erikano 4408 days ago
Off topic, but I just wanted to point out that Google Translate is really great. The quality of this translation is probably better than many human non-professional-translators would write.
2 comments

I think Swedish to English is pretty easy to do automatically to some satisfaction -- there are a lot of similarities in grammar and most words have direct translations. Chinese to English or Japanese to English with that level of clarity would be much more impressive.
The short sentences and relatively simple grammar also remove a lot of the common sources of intelligibility-threatening Google Translate errors. With German->English the most common serious error I find is that it'll unwind a compound sentence the wrong way: matches up verbs with the wrong clauses, orders clauses in an order that ends up nonsensical in English, etc. Scandinavian languages don't tend to use complex, multi-clause sentence constructions, so there's less opportunity to completely screw up the structure.
Google translate is completely worthless between chinese and english (either direction). I'm baffled every time I see people praising it.
I was just thinking about how exceptionally well this article was translated. More often than not I can't even understand the gist of what the translation is. Maybe some languages are better than others.
...or perhaps a certain threshold of translation requests triggers a flag on the resource, and it's regarded as a high-traffic asset, and gets queued for mechanical turk translation and review by a professional translation service?
I just tried translating Lithuanian -> English. Yup Google Translate is that good. Even for not wide spread languages like Lithuanian.