Existing: Free Online Translation Site For Thai ?

[AsiaWolfie]

one can easily find "free online translation" websites for any languages in the world such as Chinese, Japanese, persian, finnish, swahili and anything.....but I never found such a system offering Thai-english...... anybody knows of one ?

[peter991]

AsiaWolfie: The problem with 'free' is you get what you pay for. Somebody please correct me if I am wrong but my understanding is that Thai is a difficult language to translate to/from because unlike English there is not the spacing between words that we are used to.

The result is that Translation Websites use machine translation that makes a 'guess' at what you have written.

The only one that I used with any success was an email translator that gives you one free email(you write your email in English and it is sent in Thai) and you pay for ones after that ...

My Thai partner received the email and could understand it, but prefers I write in English.

There are a number of businesses in Thailand that charge a modest amount to translate documents.

Plan B: Buy a Thai-English dictionary. They are quite chear and many Thais own a pocket dictionary which they consult when sending emails.

Plan C: There are a number of software packages available you can buy online.

The 'free' services I googled today didn't work.

Peter

[AsiaWolfie]

actually I want to read Thai websites. there are many such system for free in the WWW where you just type the URL and ask them to translate the complete website from one language to the other. I used that many times for other "not-so-easy-and-having-different-fonts" languages such as chinese and japanese, and it worked. the translation didnt make a sense all the time, but at least I understood the basics. The chinese-english translation were surprisingly absolutely excellent, couldnt believe it. probably cause every font is a word itself..... as for Thai, yes, maybe one reason is that they dont have a space between the words....... pityyyyyyyyyyyy

[MrPissed]

one can easily find "free online translation" websites for any languages in the world such as Chinese, Japanese, persian, finnish, swahili and anything.....but I never found such a system offering Thai-english...... anybody knows of one ?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Try this web page it could help "www.suparsit.com"

[Boon Mee]

This one is free and works quite well.

[meadish_sweetball]

The site in BoonMe's reply will take you the furthest of the sites I have tried.

It gives you different meanings for each word, thereby reducing the risk of a total mistranslation (in the case of homonyms, such as English 'lead' (verb, to manage, to direct) and 'lead' (metal).

[bankei]

This one is free and works quite well.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

excellent site Boon Mee. Thanks.

Bankei

[perijon]

one can easily find "free online translation" websites for any languages in the world such as Chinese, Japanese, persian, finnish, swahili and anything.....but I never found such a system offering Thai-english...... anybody knows of one ?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

AsiaWolfie, for what it is worth, if you are sending emails. Go to www.thai2me.com, it has a 7 day free trial, after which you can purchase translation keys for you and your partner. You get one for sending in English and one for her to reply in Thai to English. Good luck!

[perijon]

The site in BoonMe's reply will take you the furthest of the sites I have tried.

It gives you different meanings for each word, thereby reducing the risk of a total mistranslation (in the case of homonyms, such as English 'lead' (verb, to manage, to direct) and 'lead' (metal).

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hey sweetball!, have you tried this one?. www.thai2me.com.

[meadish_sweetball]

Thanks for the link perijon, pardon me if I am not very impressed though.

The site is as bad as most machine translations. As soon as something deviates from the most common meaning of an expression, the program fails. Increasingly idiomatic English produces increasingly comical and incomprehensible results in Thai.

A great example is a sentence such as "How are you doing?" which the system translates as "Sabaai dee mai tham?", faithfully chewing and spitting out the translation word by word. Followed by "I am doing great" "phom/chan kamlang tham yawtyiam yuu" which is complete gibberish.

www.thai2english.com is good because it does not try to analyze or reproduce the grammar of sentences - instead it chops up the Thai text into clickable chunks and provides translations of individual words and to some extent, idiomatic expressions, with complete dictionary entries, enabling you to decide yourself which meaning of any given entry is the most likely from the context.

Much more reliable and accurate in the long run, but more demanding of the user too, of course.

[Thaipwriter]

what about this?

http://www.thai-language.com/

they have some good mp3 stuff also