Off-topic: Russian machine translation

post by thomblake · 2011-05-16T20:12:40.485Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 5 comments

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This is a little off-topic, but I can't find the answer and I realized this might actually be an excellent place to ask this question:

I've noticed Google Translate seems to do a pretty bad job sometimes of Russian-to-English and vice versa, assuming that my human-translated documents are correct.  Does anyone know of a better free service for machine translation for Russian?

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comment by Dr_Manhattan · 2011-05-16T20:37:19.448Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

you can try this - http://slovari.yandex.ru/~translate/

Replies from: thomblake
comment by thomblake · 2011-05-16T21:38:05.794Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Spot-testing a few samples, that seems remarkably better. Thanks!

comment by ewang · 2011-05-17T01:41:43.948Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Google Translate analyses translations on documents on the web, so if there aren't many documents available in both of two languages, you can infer that Google Translate won't work well for those two.

It works exceptionally well for Germanic languages, however, which have grammatical structures that closely resemble that of English. Dictionary translations are thus effective.

comment by Vladimir_M · 2011-05-16T21:39:55.964Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I can read Russian with some difficulty, and occasionally I use machine translation for help when I get stuck with the vocabulary. I've tried several translation web pages (basically the ones that come up when you google for Russian translators), but I haven't observed any that would perform noticeably better than Google Translate. Sometimes you might have better luck with one website or another, but I haven't observed any systematic patterns.

The problem is that the syntactic constructs of Russian, a much more synthetic language than English, are much harder to match with their English equivalents automatically compared with the (modern) Germanic or Romance languages, and possibly even in comparison with some non-Indo-European analytic languages.

comment by Yuu · 2012-04-26T06:22:38.844Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If you still need the translator, please have a look at this one: http://www.online-translator.com/Default.aspx?prmtlang=en

This made by the company, which specializes in machine translation from and to Russian language, so the result looks better than made by Google or Yandex translators.