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Posted

I used to have a very good Thai to English dictionary on my desktop. When I sent it in for work a while ago it was deleted and my wife has complained for me to replace it ever since. The problem is that I don't know what it was called or where it came from. I think it was already installed when I got it. I have tried to search for a replacement ever since but she is never happy, complaining the old one was better. So could anyone recommend either a good one that I can either download or use via the net, otherwise one that I can buy somewhere.

Feel free to move this to the relevant forum. It's not really about learning Thai though so I put it here.

Thanks

Posted

Also try Google language tools.

It is brilliant. It will translate anything from English to Thai from single words to pages of text. It won't be perfect by any means, but most Thais can get the gist from it.

On single words, you can translate to Thai, then cut @ paste and back translate back to Englsih and see if the same English word comes up. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

If the Thai thinks the translation is incorrect, you can put another English word in to see if it works better. e.g. I translated "medicine" to Thai and my wife said it was wrong. So I put in "drugs", and it worked fine.

Posted

Sorry for the off topic, but I just had to try Mobi's suggestion...

Google translate gives me ยา for medicine, and ยาเสพติด for drugs.

ยา refers to medicinal remedies, loosely including both modern and traditional/alternative remedies (and in colloquial speech, can also include addictive drugs), but the translation given for 'drugs', ยาเสพติด, specifically means 'addictive drugs' so it's not what you generally would ask your doctor for...

Posted
Google translate gives me ยา for medicine, and ยาเสพติด for drugs.

That is my understanding of the correct definitions also. You'll notice it regularly on Thai news channels using ยาเสพติด when televising drug captures.

Posted

Google Translate is not to be trusted. It can be consulted, it can be used in a pinch, but it can't yet be trusted. It can be wildly, absurdly wrong. So be warned.

Slightly more in line with what you're looking for is Google Dictionary (since you're looking for free).

http://www.google.com/dictionary

But it's still not always useful, because it will give you all the possible (and extremely varied) senses of the word you search. So you may not know which one is right for the context you had in mind.

For example, medicine returns 12 results:

1. เวชกรรม

2. แพทยศาสตร์

3. การบำบัดโรคโดยยา

4. ยา

5. วิชาแพทย์

6. หยูกยา

7. อายุรกรรม

8. อายุรศาสตร์

9. เภสัช

10. โอสถ

11. โอสถกรรม

12. แพทย์ศาสตร์

And the rough meanings:

1. เวชกรรม (the activity of treating the ill, as in "he practices medicine")

2. แพทยศาสตร์ (medical science, "I'm a student of medicine")

3. การบำบัดโรคโดยยา (the treatment of illness with medicine)

4. ยา (drug used to treat illness, as in "I need to buy medicine")

5. วิชาแพทย์ (the academic discipline of medicine, as in "he is a professor of medicine")

6. หยูกยา (an alliterative form of ยา, also meaning a drug for treating illness)

7. อายุรกรรม (another phrase for the activity of treating the ill, as in "he practices medicine")

8. อายุรศาสตร์ (an alternate phrase for medical science)

9. เภสัช (a fancy word for medicine, used much like English "pharmaceutical", and the root for the Thai words for "pharmacist" and "pharmacy")

10. โอสถ (another fancy word for medicine, also used in royal language)

11. โอสถกรรม (yet another, although uncommon, word for the practice of medicine)

12. แพทย์ศาสตร์ (an alternate spelling of #2, now obsolete and technically incorrect)

The reason Google Translate isn't to be trusted is that when you type a single word, it's basically guessing which one you meant, based on the frequency of the word in its internal corpus (among other factors -- their exact algorithm is proprietary). So unless a) you meant the most common meaning b ) there is only one common meaning and c) the contents of Google's corpus accurately reflect common usage in real life, you run a high risk of getting an oddball translation.

Posted

Re Google language tools.

It really depends on what you are using it for.

I used it to translate my outgoing expenses, so that my wife can understand how much it costs me to live here :)

It was fine for for that, and if it translated something incorrectly, then it wasn't the end of the world.

I know excactly how to ask for drugs in a drug store, but unfortunately I can't write Thai.

I suspect that the using the language tools for single words provides exactly the same results as using the Google dictionary. The advantage is that you can also expand your search to phrases and sentences, with the obvious caveat that you need to be careful how and in what circumstances you use it. Like my list of expenses - I put the whole thing in the language box and got an instant translation of a dozen words.

Anyway, I will leave it to you undoubted experts to debate this further.

BTW, have you ever seen the English and Thai sub titles on the pirate farang movies? I think they process the English through some computer software which transcribes by 'listening' to the dialogue. This would account for so many ridiculous 'sound alike' errors.

Then for Thai, I reckon they probably use something like Google translator to translate the emasculated English sub titles to Thai, which effectively means you end up with 90% gobbledygook. :D

My wife refuses to watch them as the Thai makes absolutely no sense.

Posted
BTW, have you ever seen the English and Thai sub titles on the pirate farang movies? I think they process the English through some computer software which transcribes by 'listening' to the dialogue. This would account for so many ridiculous 'sound alike' errors.

Then for Thai, I reckon they probably use something like Google translator to translate the emasculated English sub titles to Thai, which effectively means you end up with 90% gobbledygook. :)

My wife refuses to watch them as the Thai makes absolutely no sense.

From what I've heard, some pimply kid in Malaysia who knows some English and some Thai is doing the transcription and the translation. Before this year there hasn't been any widely available machine translation tool for Thai, but it's probable they use software, too, even if it's only to do simple bulk lookup. I'd be surprised if they had real machine translation. But if so, it's obviously not sophisticated, judging by the results!

A lot of people don't seem to realize that this is only a problem with *pirated* DVDs, like you say. I've heard people (Thai and Farang) talk about the awful subtitles on "Thai DVDs" -- apparently some folks have never bought a legitimate one! :D

And I wasn't saying that Google Translate shouldn't be used. The more it's used, and the more corrections that people give it when they see a bad translation, the better it will get. But it has to build up its corpus, which may take several more years before it's what I'd call decent. It gets more wrong that it gets right, though, at the moment.

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