FOR THE multilingual THAT USES GOOGLE TRANSLATE ...A FRIEND OR A FOE??????

Is google Translate – friend or foe?
There’s no denying that Google Translate does have its advantages and we think you should make use of them. Conversely, however, Google Translate also has some obvious disadvantages, and we’d like you to watch out for these. As is always the case, it’s an excellent idea to know your friends well - even right here in this our steemit platform,lots of my international friends i sent comments to ,i will not like mention names told me point blank that they prefer i communicate in English cause the google translation is not good at all, Imagine and i was forming,feeling cool like i am a linguist chai... This is the main thing that prompted me to drop this post today

Google Translate is a free translation tool, with the sole requirement being an internet connection. It couldn’t be easier. Google Translate supports more than 100 languages. Google’s translation tool is a big step forward in the field of translation technology. Google Translate is free, fast, and more accurate than other online translation tools.
You’ve probably at some time made use of the ”machinery” and smiled at the funny and often ratherunfortunate translation suggestions that have gone viral - or perhaps have even experienced it on your own screen. At the same time you’ve also more than likely experienced that Google Translate was your ”friend in need”,when on a busy day you needed to quickly understand a piece text in a foreign language you didn’t have a strong grasp of strong, or you just lacked the right word in an email you were writing in a foreign language.

How Does Google Translate Work?
Google’s translation tool makes use of the search giant’s stupefying web-crawling capacity to enable its translations. This is different from other rules-based translation tools. Rules-based systems require a lot of work from linguists, not to mention massive digital dictionaries. The result is an attempt at something close to word-for-word translation. Professional human translators know this just doesn’t work.
So what does Google do? Rather than use a rules-based system, Google Translate uses a statistical learning approach. It feeds billions of words (both monolingual text and “aligned” text that humans have translated) into its program. Then it lets the tool find popular matches.
The result? The tool can correctly translate the French phrase comme un éléphant dans un magasin de porcelaine into English: “like a bull in a china shop.” French speakers use éléphant and English speakers use “bull.” The animals are different but the idea is the same.

By contrast, a rules-based approach to the same phrase might produce something like “an elephant in a porcelain store.” A native English speaker would recognize this word-for-word result as wrong.

Google Translate can translate some figures of speech, but quality varies widely depending on the language. Oh, and there’s that small matter of privacy

We’ll guide you through with a brief outline of advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages:

Google Translate is free and online 24/7 fast, and more accurate than other online translation tools.
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• Google Translate is fast – it provides you with a translation in less than 1 second.
• Google Translate bases its logic on human translation. The logic is not rule-based and the translation is formed from already translated texts online.The machine is continuously evolving and hopefully will become bigger and better.
• Google Translate is fast. Incredibly fast. So fast that no human translator—or team of translators—can hope to compete with it in sheer output. A professional might translate 3,000 words in an 8-hour day. But Google Translate can do that in the blink of an eye. (In fact, GT now translates as you type.)
• Google Translate is free. Google’s translation tool costs the user nothing.
• Google Translate uses a statistical learning approach, not a rules-based approach. The result is that many (but not all) translations are culled from human translations already online.

Disadvantages:

• Google Translate offers no confidentiality. Everything translated through Google Translate is kept by Google, meaning there’s always the risk that it could end up in the wrong hands.
• Google Translate offers a ”rough”translation.. In reality, it’s not actually a translation at all, but just a scanning of related documents, websites etc. And based on this material, the programme generates a suggested text. This explains why you can also experience incorrect content or structure in Google’s suggested translation.
• Google Translate offers no form of quality control or adaption of the text to specific jargon, layout, industry or market. Basically you can never be sure that the material the machine spits out is correct or way off mark.
• Google Translate makes mistakes. Malaysia’s Sun Daily newspaper recently reported on an interview that local media conducted with Google research scientist Ashish Venugopal. Venugopal explained why translation errors occur in Google Translate. He also discussed where the technology is headed.
• Google Translate’s quality varies from language pair to language pair. The tool may produce a usable gist for an English-to-Spanish translation. Billions of words for each language can easily be found in cyberspace. Not so for Danish and Romanian. Or Turkish and Thai. Users who need a translation for rarer language pairs may find Google’s translation tool useless.
• Google Translate doesn’t offer the user any form of quality control. The search giant’s massive market dominance leads user to implicitly trust its offerings. But a user has no way of knowing whether Google’s German translation of an English text is any good. Simply getting a result—any result—in no way guarantees that the result is good.
• Google Translate is not private. In fact, when you upload your text to Google Translate, you’re effectively saying, “Here you go, Google! Take this employment contract! And our company’s marketing strategy! And this confidential policy paper!” Read Google’s terms for yourself.
It can’t rival skilled human translators when it comes to conveying all meaning accurately and naturally, When it encounters a word or phrase for which it lacks enough good translations, it may not give you the best translation. In fact, Google Translate may even output a translation that is unnatural or simply wrong.
In short, when you use Google Translate, you are handing over your text to a faceless tech giant with no guarantee of getting an accurate result in return. (This is the true cost of “free.”)

IS GOOGLE TRANSLATE ...A FRIEND OR A FOE? : The Verdict

So is Google Translate a friend or a foe ? I will say it is both , It depends on your needs. A Fortune 500 company would risk its reputation, sales, and breach of any NDA it has signed if it relied only on machine translation. It’s just not accurate enough to be used in commercial translation, even for short and relatively simple things like translations of birth certificates.
But a high school student doing a research project or two lovers from different countries and languages may want to use cause they need it ,It’s good at producing “gist” translations.
Keep the pros and cons of Google Translate in mind when using the tool. The bottom line? It’s good {Friend} for general, “low-stakes” translation. It’s not {Foe} for professional use.

Special thanks go to Dan Dingman of Fantasy Horizons and Matthew Kushinka for all their help and assistance .
Everyone please feel free to drop a comment,most preferably your best articles so that i can upvote them and also follow you , i really desire to make brand new friends and have valuable contacts all around the world.

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