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I've only used text translation for articles and such, and the only translator that it's up there, from all I've tried (quite a lot), seems to be DeepL. I speak spanish, english, french and some Portuguese, and deepL is consistently better than others.

That's not saying it's perfect. It still makes mistakes and uses weird wording sometimes, but it needs way less correction.



Agreed, deepl is pretty impressive, although its language selection is a lot smaller than, say, Google Translate.

The usual caveats of automated translation apply though. "Take it" will be translated as "tomem-no" in Portuguese, "возьми его" in Russian and "prenez-le" in French, every time assuming that the "it" is masculine (or possibly neutral, in the Russian case). Depending on context that could be confusing if the "it" is feminine in the target language's grammar.

There's also a bit of a mess with the conjugations. The Portuguese version uses "tomem", which is imperative plural (y'all take it), the french version uses "prenez" that's either imperative plural or formal/polite imperative singular, while the Russian version uses friendly/familiar imperative singular (thou, as English used to use) instead of the more polite and/or plural возьмите.

Of course those are all valid translations for "take it" in English, but in a given context only one of them will be intended by the speaker.

And those are all indo-european languages which share a common (if sometimes distant) heritage when it comes to grammar and social customs. If I spoke Japanese (which uses a complex system of honorifics) I'm sure I could come up with much more awkward translations.

In Deepl's defense however it manages to piece it together if I give it more context, for instance "The box is on my desk. Please take it." is translated as "Коробка на моем столе. Пожалуйста, возьмите ее." where it uses the correct её for the (feminine) box, and the adding "please" made it switch to the polite form of брать.

But of course in casual conversation through some online messaging application piecing together the context will be a lot harder in many cases. You have to deal with slang, incomplete sentence fragments, typos etc...


Unfortunately just text no audio and no real time.




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