Website/software Translate Text?

[katom]

Is there any GOOD(!) software or website ( free preffered )

That translate text Eng-Thai-English??

I'm talking about text not single words.

[meadish_sweetball]

Hej Katom! I am afraid the answer is 'nej' - the best resource on the web is thai2english.com even though it only does word by word translation (and some phrases).

I do believe Mike is working on a machine translation tool though - correct Mike?

At this point in time, there is no such thing as a good machine translation - not even between closely related languages. I think you would be able to achieve reasonable results between Danish, Norwegian (bokmål, not so sure about nynorsk) and Swedish, because the sentence structure is more or less the same, but as soon as you have large differences in sentence structure and word declination (böjning) you have a big problem to overcome as a programmer.

And obviously, the need for translation tools between the Nordic languages is limited - most of us Scandos can read a text in our neighbour languages without much difficulty (a few words will be unfamiliar and yet some others will be false friends... but mostly we understand written Norwegian and Danish quite well.)

For French and German, if you go to the front page of Le Monde or Der Spiegel and paste the first article you find into Babelfish or Google translate, you can see how well that works. At best, it is sufficient to understand the subject.

And the further away the languages and cultures are, the more bizarre the results become. Try to paste in text from a Japanese or Chinese daily newspaper into Babelfish (Alta vista's translation tool) or Google translate, and see what you get in English... not as comprehensible... Thai would be the same... if not worse. Newspaper language is full of jargon and slang. If you like, you can participate in our thread in this forum where we try to decipher Thai newspaper articles... it is good fun, but quite difficult.