Best Translator Thai To English

[Aleck Cobbs]

Idon't think there is any doubt that the Thai-English google translator is shockingly poor. I wonder why exactly. I can compare it to Spanish-English which I would expect to be better, but not so MUCH better.

See _Translate and the section called "Translation Methodology". The statistical method is explained as follows: "According to Och, a solid base for developing a usable statistical machine translation system for a new pair of languages from scratch would consist of a bilingual text corpus (or parallel collection) of more than a million words, and two monolingual corpora each of more than a billion words.[27] Statistical models from these data are then used to translate between those languages."

Google's difficulties are summarized, "Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations. Some languages produce better results than others. Google Translate performs well especially when English is the target language and the source language is one of the languages of the European Union. Results of analyses were reported in 2010, showing that French to English translation is relatively accurate[9] and 2011 and 2012 showing that Italian to English translation is relatively accurate as well.[10][11] However, rule-based machine translations perform better if the text to be translated is shorter; this effect is particularly evident in Chinese to English translations.[9]"

English-Spanish-English has a huge database of translated material from which to draw statistical inferences; the amount of Thai-English-Thai material available in the Google database is necessarily much more limited. This limitation means that accuracy necessarily suffers.

Google does a word by word translation but sentence construction is totally different in Thai so it comes out almost unintelligible until you work out where the subject, verb and object are. So easy to make mistakes because of this, but if you know basic thai word order and put the english into that, the answer is usually understandable to a thai person.

Forget Google translate for Thai to English. It works OK for English to Thai. I use for translating Thai to English. It works pretty good - much better than Google, plus it provides the tranliterated text as well. Useful for also learning Thai if you study the individual translationsl

Often they use English as it is spoken - which is bizarre to many non-native ears when doing literal translations of words - often where the word translated is out of context. Or a slang or euphemism is used.

For instance: "a big dog" and "the dog is big" are to different sentence(parts) in English with 2 different meanings. But in Thai หมาตัวใหญ่ can mean both, depending on the context.

- Another problem is the word ได้. This single word can have many functions depending on it's position in the sentence but also the context. It can indicate the past time or an ability and a few other things. If google fails to find statistical information on the sentence, it will do word by word translation, which will fail.

- In Thai it hard to say where a word stops or starts because the are no spaces between words. There are algorithms to detect with a certain probability where a word stops and starts, but to be 100% sure you sometimes need to understand the context.

- In Thai it's hard to find out where a sentence stops. Several block with spaces between can sometimes be translated as only one sentence in English. Again, the algorithm for finding how many "blocks" of the Thai text you've to take into account to build one English sentence is very complicated and also here sometimes an understanding of the context is necessary. Because statistical database contains very few long sentences, google will fail on translating complicated constructions (because it falls back on word by word translation).

- Thai uses particles to express feelings (while we use intonation). The particles are hard to translate. Further on the same particle can express different feelings depending on the context. It hard for a computer to understand the context.

- European languages are very similar in sentence construction. If you fall back on word to word translation because there's no statistical data available, the translation is still understandable, because the order of words in several European languages is similar. In Thai the order of words can be very different.

- Almost every word in one European language has a perfect translation in the other languages. Thai words sometimes need to be explained (there's no word for them in English). Also one Thai word can have several meaning depending on the context. In European languages different meanings of words "overlap" much more.

You need a corpus. For decades & in some case centuries, loads of government documents, novels, research papers etc etc have been expertly translated into multiple European languages by private companies and governments. So the translate algorithms have lots of info to work with. With other languages there isnt always this massive replication of professionally translated, identical documents. The Thai - English corpus is minute compared to , say , German - English.

So you get the mumbo jumbo that is Thai - English translation on Google. It also accounts for the fact that Google is pretty good when it comes to translating well written, grammatically correct sentences but when you start throwing in slang it gets confused.

Does anyone know how much weight the crowdsourced corrections carry? I've been running the same phrases (plus a few added each year) through GT for five years now and the results don't seem to be improving that much. Could it just be a matter of not enough people interested in correcting Thai?

I am on Google+ a lot of the time and I get comments in many different languages. It does these incredibly well. This morning I was looking at some of the comments my wife and her friends were saying in Thai in Facebook. The language translation was by Bing and it was horrible just garbage. So I tried the same translation in Google and I think it was slightly better than Bing but still useless. No wonder I find it so difficult to understand my wife!

There are some tools which do decent word for word trans, but the only way to really 'get there' is to get out the "dictionyelly" plus the grammar books and hack it out laddie....(recommend David Smyth's Thai grammar book thingymybob)

พูดภาษาไทยได้นิดหน่อย - T2E comes into its own (a range of possibilities is helpful with longer sentences especially). GT fails with "Thailand speaks a little."

"Babylon" (free translator gives you 5 translations only!!!) is a bit better, at least you can get the rough idea of what is being said in Thai, but they want a subscription every month for the non free one.

I think the remark about slang language is a very good remark. In Thai writing language or formal language and speaking language are very different. When I just finished my first Thai course in BKK I could understand the prime minister when he would speak on TV, but I could not understand any of the workers that came to build/fix our house (even when they spoke central Thai). In school they taught me formal language.

Because the corpus is probably based on writing language or formal language google translate is really useless when we try to translate the messages our new girlfriend posts or facebook or her chat/e-mail messages we spy on

The most popular English to Thai translation app for travel in Thailand is undoubtedly Google Translate. But even though Google Translate is the translator app used most by tourists, it is not the best one for all situations. Yes, Google Translate does do a good job translating Thai signs and Thai menus with its camera translation function, and it does provide you with workable translations into the Thai language. But it falls short as a Thai translation app that facilitates easy, two-way communication between you and the Thai people you meet on your holiday.

1. Its user interface is more intuitive and user-friendly, with larger buttons and clearer text. The SayHi translation app is quicker, easier, and more efficient to use when communicating back and forth with Thai people, requiring that you only have to tap your phone once (to start recording).

2. It offers real-time, two way, voice translation to and from Thai language, which means you can have a back and forth conversation with a Thai person without needing to type anything. This can be very useful in situations where you need to communicate quickly.

3. It is better at recognizing the words you speak, and Thai words that the other person speaks. If the SayHi translation app thinks that it has heard a word wrong (because the sentence sounds wrong or awkward), it will ask you if it heard you right or give you the opportunity to speak the sentence again.

6. It offers a feature that allows you to immediately hear the pronunciation of words and phrases spoken by a native speaker (with a single tap on the phone), which can be very helpful in learning Thai and improving your own pronunciation. You can practice speaking Thai into the translation app to make sure that your spoken Thai is understandable to others.

7. It keeps a record of your conversations with Thai people, which you can go back and review (both the written Thai and the spoken Thai), which also makes it a great tool for learning the Thai language.

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