Amanda Takes Off...

Google Translate can give some very flaky translations, especially for Korean (it is a bit better with Spanish, though, in my experience). Due to the phrase matching system they use, even changing speech levels in the Korean text will sometimes result in a vastly different English translation.

Oh yeah, I know. Half the time Google tells you "bed spread." (Actually, I think they've fixed that.) I think it's easier the more closely related the languages are. Korean and English? Not exactly close.

Yes, I agree, online translations are terrible with Korean. Have you found any program that works or is better than others? Thanks

Terry, my husband and my own head are better than online programs.

No, really, I haven't found a decent program. At some point someone screwed around with the program, so if you entered something simple like 가자, it came out as vamonos, which, last time I checked, was Spanish.

No more than a couple weeks ago, Google Translate was translating 화이팅 as "vámonos" (though it gives "fighting" instead now). When it did this, I double-checked that my target language wasn't set to Spanish, as that was an unexpected result. However, after doing some research, vámonos is apparently considered one of those terms that English has informally adopted from Spanish now.

I don't know anyone who uses vamonos in English unless they're doing it to be cute and speak Spanish. I must be hanging out with the wrong crowd.

I once tried translating 통일 화이탕!" (something we said after every taekwondo class) and it came out as "unity anger thing."

I think one of Google's problems is the "suggest a better translation" button. I suspect if you got enough people to suggest a totally off translation ("새랑해요=I hate you"), you could trick Google into using the wrong translation.