Posted By: MDean

Well, I will in no way say that I am a master user in Japanese (in fact this is more like a hobby than any type of educational value) however, as many n00bs, I have used several online translation sites (google, excite, yahoo) and out of all them, I find Yahoo honyaku to be more helpful because of a nice quality that many of the other sites don't have; the translated text has a link to the orignal text to effectively "see" what each word/Kanji represent in English, something that also happens to be present in Jisho's "search sentence" feature to a certain extent.
So my question is this; if you have ever used one, which is in your own personal opinion the best online translator out there to not only help you translate, but also help you understand?

I will just go right out and state my opinion on automatic translation instead of being on-topic ;)

In my experience, automatic translation (machine translation) is completely and utterly useless for languages which aren't directly related. From spanish to english and back, sure, if you know 0 spanish and desperately need to use a spanish site, it will usually be quite allright... but for any form of serious translation? Even that is bad, and that is NOTHING compared to how crappy machine translation is from japanese to english.

So yeah, my personal opinion is that machine translation is useless. Either you know enough japanese to translate by hand, or you do not know enough japanese to use the site. Since the sentences you get from the translation are pretty much unreadable, it won't help you at all with the actual translation process, so I really see no purpose to them. If you want to use it for individual words (which it might actually be able to do without much problem), rikaichan, peraperakun and moji are much better solutions since they list several meanings and you only have to translate the parts you do not know.

Posted By: Tobberoth

If you want to use it for individual words (which it might actually be able to do without much problem), rikaichan, peraperakun and moji are much better solutions since they list several meanings and you only have to translate the parts you do not know.

Yeah, I know what you mean, truthfully, being a ESL speaker, I know that online translations only help in giving you a brief/general idea of what is being said, whicc is why I use it like Yi Zhen says

Posted By: Yi Zhen

I generally like to useWWWJDICinstead to "translate" and then piece together the meaning on my own.

Exciteis a good translator for SOME things.

Agreed, I have used excite (compared to Google that one is way better but normally if the text is confusing I tend to use those 3, perhaps I should use Tobberoth's picks too.

Posted By: Tobberoth

Posted By: Yi Zhen

I usually use online translations to help me "double check" if my original translation was okay unless I am fully sure that my translation is 100% correct, or if I don't get some parts and need a general gist of the text.

I generally like to useWWWJDICinstead to "translate" and then piece together the meaning on my own.

Exciteis a good translator for SOME things.

The thing is, since the machine translation is usually incorrect, you're doublechecking your translation against a very bad source. Maybe your translation differs from the machine translation because YOUR translation is correct and theirs isn't?

I agree with Tobberoth. I use online dictionaries (e.g. Denshi Jisho) to translate words, but I'm not a fan of translation software for whole chunks of text.

If you're able to type in Japanese on your computer, then presumably you also have some kind of spellcheck and grammar check - I'd trust that more than translation software.

I sometimes write a sentence myself and then Google it to see if I can find instances of Japanese people phrasing it the same way.