Quote:
Originally Posted by hoian
This statement is a bit misleading. If Google is as good as u make it sound, u wouldn't be asking for VN translations, right?
Try this:
"ở việtnam từ đó không phải ai cũng có thể nói được đâu"
Or something simple: di choi ko ru
Tell me what u get from Google.
I think it's more a case of... "everyday u talk to anyone using that app"... and they will pretend to understand your gibberish because you are a foreigner.  |
Haha. Well, not really -- someone else said that too -- I only ask for translations when I get stuck and it's timely, like I need to reply soon to it. There were a few times that happened in the past year, they're mostly in the Tieng Viet thread. What's not in there are the rest of the time when it worked well for me and I didn't need help. That was about 99.97% of the time.
I've just been talking to a Vietnamese person who doesn't speak English in Zalo for about an hour. We know each other well, about a year. And ok we both have a lot of practice using Google translate on our phones by now. Sometimes she makes a mistake and writes me something in that abbreviation-ish Vietnamese, then she'll catch it and rewrite it more simply. Even a website girl did that for me (before she even had met me). It's not perfect but it really is getting better and better. In our conversation tonight there was just one time when she wrote something I couldn't make out, but then I thought and realized what she meant and it was actually not google's fault but more me mistaking the context. (she's buying a tablet, she said if she buys it in installments, her sister has to be named. What she meant was that her sister's name has to go on the paperwork for it -- so if you are good at working something like that out, you'll be fine).
Are you here in VN now? Seriously, next time you are (if you are not now), head to one of those D10 cafes and pull out your smartphone with G-translate on it. See how it goes. I can't remember what your VN level is, but pretend it's zero and go from there. You have to think a bit about what you are writing, try to make it as simple and clear as possible so Google (and your VN friend) doesn't get confused. Avoid slang (though it's getting better at English to Vietnamese slang translations at least, but not so much the other direction).
And if you are sitting with someone and get stuck, you just say "khong hieu" and they try again, rephrase what they said until they get the idea across.
OK just a quick look at what you wrote above to translate. For sure you can't try to use abbreviations like 'ko' and 'ru' but you'd only get that from someone SMSing you, not someone you are sitting there with who can see you're not Vietnamese. It fails on those abbreviations/slang that you get in SMS from (for example) website girls, but if they include some whole words in it, you might be able to figure the rest out. And also in the English one, it wouldn't handle 'u'. So you quickly learn to avoid things like that. "Everyday" might cause a problem because it's actually supposed to be "every day" (2 words) -- and if you write it as 2 words it will translate it well. "everyday" is an adjective like in "Some of his everyday activities included exercise and listening to music." Yeah so if someone makes vocab or grammar errors, or misspellings, those can cause trouble.