How accurate is Google Translator when translating English to French or Spanish?

Glenak: 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!

Answers and Views:

Answer by patriot
Eh. Depends on the original text. Sometimes it can be extremely accurate. Sometimes not.

The original text can not have any misspellings, homonyms, slang, or figurative language.

Answer by Photographer108
It really isn’t great. I’m not fluent but i’m doing advanced higher french and higher spanish at the moment and i know from past experience it isn’t that accurate! SDL translation is a lot better!

Answer by Jim G
English to Spanish: even though it has improved, i wouldn’t say it is good. It’s useful to figure out a broad meaning, but too often misinterprets the terms when they have more than one sense.

Answer by GrahamH
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….

Answer by RE
No good at all. Here’s why. Most words have more than one meaning, but online translators pick just one. Most of the time it is not the right one. So the result is gibberish. You can’t rely on it at all. You would do better to use an online dictionary like WordReference.com

Input one word at a time, choose your language, then you can choose among the many meanings depending on what your context is. If it is part of a phrase, check at the bottom of the page for forum explorations of the exact meaning of the phrase in context. Plus you get full conjugations of verbs. A much smarter approach than throwing in the whole sentence at once. Maybe not garbage in, but definitely garbage out.