Google translate Toolbar.

[anotheoldgit]

Today I translated this web page into Spanish, using the Google translate toolbar.

The trouble being afterwards although I had set it back to English, it kept on reverting everything back to Spanish, even though I had ticked the box 'always translate in English'

In the end I had to close down the site, and then open it up again, everything seems to be back to normal now.

Any ideas please on what I should have done?.

[Khandro]

http://babelfish.yahoo.com/ Yes, give up google and use this one instead. It's much easier to use and produces better translations.

[rojash]

Right-click on the translate button and choose options
Select English in the "Translate to" drop-down
A bit further down is a section "Don't translate when a page is in..."
Make sure you've got English in the list, and if Spanish is in the list, click on it, then click the remove button

[MarkRae]

As an aside, any linguist will tell you that these "translation" sites are worse than useless. It simply requires far to much computer processing power to cope with all the subtle nuances of language than is available on the average web server.

[pa___ul3]

Mark's dead right, they have no understanding of context or syntax which is absolutely crucial in attaining a proper translation. They should really only be used for individual words in my opinion.
If you need any bits translating into Spanish I can help, wouldn't have time to do anything big though!!

[Ellipsis]

They are definitely improving though. Now, with Google Translate on Android, I can speak into my phone in English and it will translate into almost any language and speak that translation back out! And the same in reverse. So, although it's a bit ropy at present, we're not far off the time when you'll be able to have a pretty good conversation with almost anyone in the world and, one day, a true electronic Babelfish...

[MarkRae]

We are years, if not decades, away from that!

Go here: http://translate.google.com/ and ask it to translate this (very famous) piece of English: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day

It's funny enough in French, but the Spanish is positively ludicrous!

[rojash]

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day "

Mind you. I bet half the kids leaving school today wouldn't understand that sentence.

[Khandro]

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day". If you really expect a computer driven translation of such texts, then it is little surprise that you are going to have strange results. The laugh is really on you and the failure is yours not the computers. When did you, if ever, last use words in your everyday speech like 'tolls', 'knell', or 'parting day'? To get good results you need to you good simple everyday English, in short, clear, jargon and idiom free sentences.

[MarkRae]

Didn't like that one, eh? OK, then, try this short everyday phrase:

"There's a lot of it about, these days."

[ChuckFickens]

I love the results you get sometimes from babelfish when you translate into one language and then straight back to English.

"There's a lot of it about, these days" to Spanish and straight back to English comes out as...... "There' portion of the S.A. of her around, at the moment"

Makes perfect sense :)

[anotheoldgit]

Thank you for all your answers even the reminder of 'Gray's elegy written in a country churchyard', I love that poem.

But I didn't want to translate anything into Spanish, I just clicked it out of curiosity, and then couldn't get it back to normal.

But thanks to rojash's instructions I will now know what to do.

Thank you all once again, for taking the time to answer my query.

[Khandro]

"There's a lot of it about, these days."
This is not a very clear or complete sentence; you should replace "There's" with "There is", and what is "It" that there is a lot of ? Also "About" is a word capable of several interpretations in English alone. I have just put " There is much stupidity now", in Babel fish for a German translation and came out word perfect.