Hi Hilmar

long time no ... type :-)

i agree strongly. i have used services like bable-fish quite a few times to translate from english to german and spanish either which way. about 75% of the stuff translated gives you a basic idea, but the wording is ussually totaly wrong. sometimes it even translates so funny...

those services can only be used as a rugh guidline.


>Hehe, that reminds me of the news-story, of a German city that published a tourism pamphlet. They decided to save the cost of a professional translator, and use a free service instead. Only AFTER printing 7000 copies did they notice that the automatic service had rendered their text useless... and they had to start over again. Of course, they did not take the precaution to have it reviewed.
>
>I assume that when translating words or short phrases, you might get a higher percentage of useful results (as compared to long paragraphs)... but that you would still get a significant amount of garbage.