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Thread: Google Translate

  1. #1
    Guild Artisan su_liam's Avatar
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    Default Google Translate

    So I've been using babelfish for quite some time to create somewhat valid names in languages with latin orthography. Yeah, I sometimes use babelfish for Russian or Greek, but transcription is a pain in the cloaca. Now, I've been using Google Translate(http://translate.google.com), because of it's selection of languages. Indonesian? Sweet! But, I just realized, Google Translate has romanization for a few languages, like Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Greek, Korean and, after a fashion, Thai. Sadly, no romanization for Hebrew or Arabic. Grr. Still, I can drop in the occasional Firefly-Chinese curse, "zhù nǐ shēng huó zài yǒu xiē yǒu qù de shí dài," for instance. Yeah, no Latin either. I'll have to keep my English-Latin/Latin-English dictionary for awhile, I guess.

  2. #2
    Guild Artisan su_liam's Avatar
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    White mountains - bái shān
    Blood river - xuè liú chéng hé
    Field of gold - jīn chǎng
    iron palace - tiě gōng
    Emerald City - fěi cuì chéng
    City of Angels - tiān shǐ zhī chéng
    City of Roses - méi guī chéng

  3. #3
    Community Leader mearrin69's Avatar
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    Cool stuff. I posted some other general chinese names in the Cartographic Terminology thread [link]. Honestly never thought of using Babelfish...silly me.
    M

  4. #4
    Community Leader Facebook Connected torstan's Avatar
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    Yep, I've been using google translate for a bit too. It's really nice and seems to mostly make sense. Better than my previous experience of Babelfish, but that was a while ago now.

  5. #5
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    The Translator may work for several words, but when you try to translate sentences or groups of words (like City of Roses), you shouldn't show the result to a native. Normaly it is a catastrophe.

  6. #6
    Guild Artisan su_liam's Avatar
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    "Dude! That ain't proper Chinese!"
    "That's okay. Dà Guó isn't China."

    EDIT:
    I can't speak to the English-to-{$x} translations, 'cause I don't speak {$x}. But the {$x}-to-English translations have been getting progressively better in the last couple of years. I used to only use computer translation to create interesting semi-realistic names for people, places and things, but recently I have actually found translated webpages to lack much of the old "all you base" ambiance. YMMV, but hey...
    Last edited by su_liam; 02-16-2010 at 03:52 PM.

  7. #7
    Community Leader mearrin69's Avatar
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    I'm not a native speaker but I can't see what's wrong with mei gui cheng. I'd have gone with mei gui shi, but it sounds okay to me. What should it have been?
    M

  8. #8
    Guild Artisan su_liam's Avatar
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    I think it was a general comment about reliability. "City" is pretty easy. Probably no worries there. "City of Happy Prancing Ponies Happily Cavorting Through the Streets" Might come out a little odd. BTW, I guess that was, "pǎo mǎ shì yuè mǎ xiǎo mǎ lìng rén gāo xìng de shì zài jiē shàng xī nào."

    Given that I'm not too fixated on a perfect translation, I would probably make alterations to suit my own aesthetics. Instead of, "xuè liú chéng hé," for, "Blood River," I might use, "Xuè-Liú Chéng ," or something. Maybe drop the diacritics.

    Naah! I like my diacritics! Deathtöngue, forever!

  9. #9
    Community Leader mearrin69's Avatar
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    Run "pǎo mǎ shì yuè mǎ xiǎo mǎ lìng rén gāo xìng de shì zài jiē shàng xī nào" back through the translator. I bet you get "What...?!? Someone set us up the bomb!"

    I fully expect my setting to be full of "all your base"-alikes. My Chinese is very rusty and never was all *that* great to begin with. Maybe sounds okay to us yang guizi though.
    M

  10. #10
    Guild Artisan su_liam's Avatar
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    Sadly, even the google translator can only output pinyin. I don't know of anything to convert a string of pinyin into Chinese. Or English, for that matter...

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