Free On Line Thai Text To English Translators

[Beetlejuice]

Sometimes I want to translate documents or emails received in Thai text into English.

I have tried Google translate, Bing and few other free on line machine translators, but all are pretty useless, just giving a garbled view of the Thai version meaning.

Does anyone have knowledge of any more precise free on line Thai text to English text machine translator websites out there? Or could make any recommendations?

Beety.

[justaphase]

I always use this.. the bulk look-up is cool.

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

Also there's a "pinned" i think in the thai language section on this very site...

Edited January 13, 2011 by justaphase

[Kwasaki]

I just ask the Mrs. what's this lingo going on about and she always makes it into something happy.

Edited January 13, 2011 by Kwasaki

[elwood]

I always use this.. the bulk look-up is cool.

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

Also there's a "pinned" i think in the thai language section on this very site...

Yes, I have found this site to be very, very good.

And a couple of days ago I downloaded Google Translate Desktop, free software from www.athtek.com - only tried it a couple of times so far, but it translated instantly and well. Worth a look and a longer trial, seeing as it's free.

Elwood

[webfact]

moved to Internet Forum

[floridaguy]

try thai2english.com

[Beetlejuice]

Thank you everyone, but I have tried all those suggested, none are good, all about the same standard as Google.

Judging by the lack of responses, I guess there isn`t really a word perfect on line Thai text to English text translator.

Thanks anyway, it was worth a try.

[devdrinker]

didnt read fully, poster has tried google translate without success. my bad. i thought it was okay

Edited January 13, 2011 by devdrinker

[noise]

Norton shows a threat:

[BB1950]

Norton shows a threat:

Their Google Translate software seems to be rather ad oriented and poor. Not recommended! There are much better alternatives that use on-line services such as Google and Bing.

Edited January 14, 2011 by BB1950

[grin]

For anyone that does like using Google Translate there is a nice little application wrapper for the Mac called Lingoo which is available at download.cnet.com.

[Nawak]

For anyone that does like using Google Translate there is a nice little application wrapper for the Mac called Lingoo which is available at download.cnet.com.

Or another widget for the dashboard: Translator

[thunder30101]

No matter how good the software you cannot translate a simple language into a complex language.

[mkawish]

Thank you everyone, but I have tried all those suggested, none are good, all about the same standard as Google.

Judging by the lack of responses, I guess there isn`t really a word perfect on line Thai text to English text translator.

Thanks anyway, it was worth a try.

Hi again Beetlejuice

What do you need to be translated?

[Peppy]

No matter how good the software you cannot translate a simple language into a complex language.

It isn't so much a matter of complexity as it is a matter of similarity--Language pairs which use similar metaphors and figures of speech to express ideas tend to be easier for computers to translate. English and Thai are very different languages, which is why only a human translator fluent in both languages can clearly translate concepts from one to the other.

To suggest that Thai is somehow more simple than English is highly misleading; both started out as what you might call basic "tribal languages" with only simple, everyday concepts, but as the people who used them developed and were exposed to more complex ideas of things like government, organised religion, and science, they borrowed words from other languages (in the case of English, mostly Latin and Greek, and in the case of Thai, mostly Sanskrit and Pali, though English is also highly influenced by old German and French, and Thai by Khmer) in order to talk about these things. For both languages, these developments occurred several hundred years ago, and today both are rich languages that can be used to express just about any idea equally well, be it simple talk about one's feelings or plans for the next week, or more complex discussions of topics like international politics or particle physics.

[thunder30101]

^ <deleted> are you talking about ? You are talking such bs saying the thai language isnt a simple language unable to be used to explain anything complex. Some people will defend anything thai. One tense compared to twelve is just the beginning of the problems with the thai language and any other simple language for that matter. Im not down on the thai language only pointing out the facts of it. The only misleading statements here are yours. There is a reason there is an abundance of work editing research papers in english for thai masters and phd candidates, there just are not any words or grammar in the thai language to explain their work.

[Peppy]

^ <deleted> are you talking about ? You are talking such bs saying the thai language isnt a simple language unable to be used to explain anything complex. Some people will defend anything thai. One tense compared to twelve is just the beginning of the problems with the thai language and any other simple language for that matter. Im not down on the thai language only pointing out the facts of it. The only misleading statements here are yours. There is a reason there is an abundance of work editing research papers in english for thai masters and phd candidates, there just are not any words or grammar in the thai language to explain their work.

Anything that can be explained in English can be explained in Thai just as well, and vice versa. Tenses, or different verb forms, have nothing to with it--what we call "tense" in English is only one method of defining when events occur in relation to the present, or to each other, and Thai, like every other language, has its own mechanisms for doing this. The reason Thai researchers write their paper in English isn't that their own language is somehow unable to describe the ideas they want to present--it's because if they wrote them in Thai, the audience for them would be limited only to Thai speakers. By writing in English, they make their work available to people all over the world, be they Japanese, German, American, Russian, or Brazilian. English isn't inherently better, it's just the currently agreed-upon medium for exchanging information between people who speak different languages.

The fact that many of these research papers are poorly written and require extensive editing to be presentable brings us more or less back on topic--the reason is that, as I said, English is very different from Thai (the different ways of expressing tense between the two languages are a case in point), and it takes a huge amount of work for a speaker of one language to get their head around the differences of the the other. For humans at least, it is possible--in the case of computers, they will need to develop something akin to human consciousness of context and relationships between objects before they'll ever be able to produce perfectly accurate translations. Of course, if computers ever develop consciousness, the lack of any language barriers between people will probably be quite far down on the list of interesting implications.

Edited January 16, 2011 by Peppy

[nikster]

Let's face it, translation is hard.

People often asked me to translate some document from German to English (native German speaker, fluent in English) - I sometimes tried, and it takes a lot of time and effort.

Even just getting the basic meaning right is often impossible without understanding the context - and computers simply can't understand context.

That said I also found Google translate to be mostly useless on Thai - other languages they can do much better. Might be because the languages are so different, or maybe Thai is particularly contextual - I don't really know. I tried to translate some joking comments on facebook with only marginal success. Computers have no humor, I suppose.

[PattayaParent]

Let's face it, translation is hard.

People often asked me to translate some document from German to English (native German speaker, fluent in English) - I sometimes tried, and it takes a lot of time and effort.

Even just getting the basic meaning right is often impossible without understanding the context - and computers simply can't understand context.

That said I also found Google translate to be mostly useless on Thai - other languages they can do much better. Might be because the languages are so different, or maybe Thai is particularly contextual - I don't really know. I tried to translate some joking comments on facebook with only marginal success. Computers have no humor, I suppose.

We Brits always thought it's becuase Germans have no humour.

[huma79]

^ <deleted> are you talking about ? You are talking such bs saying the thai language isnt a simple language unable to be used to explain anything complex. Some people will defend anything thai. One tense compared to twelve is just the beginning of the problems with the thai language and any other simple language for that matter. Im not down on the thai language only pointing out the facts of it. The only misleading statements here are yours. There is a reason there is an abundance of work editing research papers in english for thai masters and phd candidates, there just are not any words or grammar in the thai language to explain their work.

I'm guessing this isn't a serious post, just trying to stir up a reaction. I'm not sure on what authority you're making this claim, but anyone who is fluent in both languages would disagree. Anything that can be expressed in English can be expressed in Thai. Language is just a tool for communicating - and any deficiencies would likely come from the person communicating, not the language itself.