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Help me with translations

Zephyr58542
New in Town
Posts: 2
Joined: October 11th, 2008 6:06 am

Help me with translations

Postby Zephyr58542 » October 11th, 2008 8:34 am

How would you ask a girl you like if she live's alone or with family but without asking if she has a boyfriend or husband.

Also, how accurate are the yahoo & google translators for english to korean.

Zephyr58542
New in Town
Posts: 2
Joined: October 11th, 2008 6:06 am

Is this right

Postby Zephyr58542 » October 11th, 2008 8:42 am

Would this be accurate?

당신은 혼자 사는가?

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manyakumi
Expert on Something
Posts: 679
Joined: January 26th, 2008 6:49 am

Re: Is this right

Postby manyakumi » October 11th, 2008 9:04 am

Zephyr58542 wrote:Would this be accurate?

당신은 혼자 사는가?


Kind of funny. :lol:


You may ask just as,

혼자 살아요? or 혼자 사세요?


:wink:

holdfast
Expert on Something
Posts: 337
Joined: December 15th, 2007 3:45 am

Postby holdfast » October 11th, 2008 1:05 pm

generally those kinds of translators can be o.k. if you are looking up a single word, but are awful if you are trying to translate anything more than that. even with single words, they can be inaccurate..

the best (in my opinion) korean/english online dictionary is at http://endic.naver.com/ - you can search in korean or english, but again, it's only good for looking up single words, and even then, take everything with a grain of salt.

unfortunately, there really isn't a way to translate without understanding the language or asking a person who does understand the language. if you have more questions, there are plenty of us here who can help (:

javiskefka
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Posts: 454
Joined: January 10th, 2008 9:01 am

Postby javiskefka » October 11th, 2008 2:49 pm

The Google Translate engine uses statistics to come up with the most likely translation given the combination of the words as a whole, and it also allows user to give feedback on the translations, so it should improve over time. At present it's much better than babelfish, but it has trouble with things like person, number, mood and parts of speech sometimes. It does surprisingly well on idiomatic expressions, like "I see what you mean," that usually trip up machine translators, though.

matthew254
Expert on Something
Posts: 282
Joined: May 8th, 2008 6:55 pm

Postby matthew254 » October 11th, 2008 4:27 pm

I agree with javiskefka. two different ways to install google translate onto Firefox can be found here: http://www.koreanclass101.com/forum/vie ... php?t=1422 google isn't the best but it's head and shoulders above babelfish

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