How accurate is Google Translator when translating English to French or Spanish?
How accurate would you say Google Translator is when translating English to French, or English to Spanish? I’d love answers from fluent French and Spanish speakers, cheers!
Translators have no chance whatsoever of getting it right if the original is not 100% grammatically correct and correctly spelt. Even then, translators do not understand idioms or context. For example, if you ask for the translation for "hydraulic ram" it is just as likely to give a translation meaning "aquatic male sheep"; if you type in an expression such as "I feel like death warmed up", it will probably give you an expression meaning "I want to die in a fire".
Conversely, I saw the Spanish expression "No sé nada de inglés" (I know nothing about English) emerge as "He does not swim himself of groins" – because the original writer had not put in the written accents.
The point is that to be sure that a translator is giving you a correct translation you have to be totally conversant with both languages so that you can check the results – all of which seems to rather defeat the object of the exercise….