Professional translation program?

[Challe77]

Is there a professional translation program from thai-english and reverse?

I find google translate very lacking sometimes, sometimes the translation is dead wrong. I Instead had to take the thai words do a reverse phonemic transcription and then had to translate each word individually by looking at a lexicon, this may be good for learning but not for having a smooth conversation.

Is there a professional thai translation program out there that is more reliable and accurate? , I would be willing to pay if needed.

/Karl

[Curt]

Literal Thai to English translation is quite difficult. I think takes too much "fuzzy" logic for a computer.

[Tod-Daniels]

Sorry for the long post. ... (I have a bad habit of that)

Earlier this year, just being the curious person I am (and seeing as curiosity only seems fatal to cats, lol) I decided to check the quality of translation services available in Bangkok.

I took two samples of text I "wanted" translated to several companies which offer "back-'n-forth" translation.

One was a brief letter written in English in a manner I'd call "colloquially friendly". It was obvious by the word structure and usage the people were well acquainted with one another.

The other was short conversation in Thai I ripped (shamelessly) from a chat room sort of like a letter too. I'd also qualify that as "colloquially friendly" insofar as the Thai doing the writing certainly knew the person they were speaking to, either intimately or as friends in their immediate group. The stuff I received was quite interesting.

Most companies got the English to Thai close to what it was meant to say. Some were a little too formal, but overall they were still close to the meaning.

The Thai to English translations were so disparate I wondered if I hadn't given the companies different text!!

I mean it was ALL over the map as far as what they came up with in English. I certainly didn't think it'd be too far from what I thought the conversation said, but some of the stuff I got back was like apples and oranges. In fact, one of the translations was so far off the mark; I couldn't make heads or tails out of it no matter how much I re-read it.

Now perhaps my own understanding of written Thai isn't quite as good as I make it out to be. Almost none of them were close to what I thought the Thai said in English.

OR

Perhaps there's so much leeway in how stuff written in Thai can be interpreted and translated into English that can be done in different ways with a multitude of emotional possibilities. Maybe, to an extent all of them were right (except the one which gave me gibberish), lol.

I've seen this in a Thai language class I join once in a while too. The teacher will write a sentence in Thai on the board and the students hafta write down what they think it says in English. Almost every person couches or phrases their version differently. Although I don't see near the variance I saw in the translation shops stuff. Then again there's only so many ways you can write "Rice farmers plant rice in their fields twice a year" in english, lol..

Still it was an interesting 'test', and made me realize that if you're going for something which is "out of the ordinary" or "situation specific", especially something which carries emotive value or "felt meaning", you need to run it past as many translators as you can to see which one is close.

I think Google Translates fails miserably on anything but the most rudimentary sentence constructs. It’s not too bad on single words, or really short phrases (especially often used ones). Getting anything useful from blocks of text can be a very "tough row to hoe". ..

Again, sorry for the long post and sorry if it was off topic too. ..