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.

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

Cool stuff. I posted some other general chinese names in the Cartographic Terminology thread [link]. Honestly never thought of using Babelfish...silly me.
M

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.

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.

"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...

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

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!

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

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...