Spanish Sentences Translated & Online Translators

When you are looking for Spanish sentences translated to English, you may think it is a good idea to use an online translation site. After reading this article, you may think again. The purpose here is to prepare students of Spanish to be aware of what to expect from online translators when seeking their own Spanish sentences translated to English.

Free online translation websites, such as the one on AltaVista, are rudimentary at best. They do manage most times to translate the gist of the meaning behind the original sentence, so if this is what you are looking for you need not read further, but only go forth and use them. But if what you want is to translate a sentence from Spanish into purposeful and correct English, you should have a basic idea of Spanish sentence structure as well as a dictionary.

Online translators are machine translators; they use unchanging databases to give you literal translations that are often too literal. Often different online translators will give you different versions of a translation, depending on each translator site’s separate database. Sometimes a word that has more than one meaning in English will be translated into two different words in Spanish (a word for each different meaning), and the online translator cannot differentiate between the two. Often a translation using this kind of resource will result in gross translation errors.

Indeed, sometimes an online translator is not even as knowledgeable as a beginning Spanish student with a dictionary. Perhaps the appeal of these translators is that they are fast, which is not being denied. However, if you insist on having your Spanish sentences translated to English via an online translator, then there are some things you should be aware of before you proceed.

There is quite a list of errors that machine translators can make. Prepositions can be a nightmare to translate through an online service. For example, the Spanish word de, which can mean “of” in English, can be misconstrued in a machine translation as “than.” In the Spanish language, subjects such as “he,” “she,” or “mom” are often left out when their meaning is explicit, but online translators are unable to incorporate them into an English translation, even though English requires subjects in all sentences. Online translators will translate proper nouns, even if you don’t want them to, though this is easy enough to resolve if you are aware of it. If a word you have typed in to be translated is not in the translator’s dictionary, the resulting translation will have left out the word. If you are not fluent enough in Spanish to spot this, your translation could suffer greatly.

Hopefully you have been convinced not to use an online translator for Spanish sentences translated to English, especially if what you require is a precise and meaningful translation. However, if you are only trying to understand the gist of what has been written, then by all means utilize an online translator. Just remember, it won’t be perfect.