Does anyone have a favourite on-line translator. I use google but it’s geared to South Waleon and I am in the North. Sometimes its translation doesn’t make sense either. Anyone have a better?
From school I learnt that there’s no good free translator, because they don’t understand what you are trying to say, they can just follow patterns to guess which translation you want. So they’re good for individual words, but can’t handle a sentence. A sentence Google Translate spits out is a mixture of literal translation, pattern-following, and guesswork. That’s why it rarely makes sense.
So I find it best to just learn the language as best you can, then use a god dictionary, like a physical copy of an OED English/Welsh dictionary, or to a lesser extent glosbe.com. These offer different words you might want to use to translate. The OED dictionaries say when you’d use each, so that helps. Then you can use knowledge from a course to translate the stuff yourself. The dictionaries won’t translate grammar, that’s up to what you’ve learnt yourself.
So unfortunately there won’t be a good one that always makes sense, you’ve got to do it yourself…
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Sometimes, especially when it is a lot of text to translate, I put it through Google Translate and then work through it, comparing the translation to the Welsh text and correcting it where they’ve gone off track (which they do often). It is actually really good practice!
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I use Google Translate although it doesn’t make any sence from time to time, but I had the oposite impression, that it’s more Northern related then southern. Many southern words which I put into it didn’t return any result or it was really something completely off topic (as one wouldd say). However I find it quite useful. I’ve described how I and for what I use it very efficiently here. (However if you tend to read and reply to that post, rather come back into your own topic and make a reply here as that topic was set for different subject (Why you learn Welsh). 
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There is also Bing translate. I think it’s about the same really, although less flexible for translating a lot of text.
I only ever use GT or BT to go from Welsh to English. In that direction, I don’t really recognise any bias towards one dialect or another.
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Sorry, I tried Bing and didn’t like it so that’s why I didn’t mention it. I still find GT better.
I have mentioned in other topics that I have two dictionaries, one very small and old, the other much newer and bigger and I frequently find words missing!! Sometimes that’s because I know old fashioned ones!! I only use Google for individual words which I can’t find in my dictionaries!! The most recent being ‘gelding’, ‘adfarch’, which was in the old one from English but not Cymraeg and not in the new one at all!!! So, grab all the help you can and ask for help on the forum when stuck!!! 
Depends a bit what you’re trying to do - but in general terms, Google is still pretty much streets ahead of anything else I’ve seen (it’s not so much geared to southern as to formal, which is because of the input documents they have).
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[quote=“henddraig, post:7, topic:3352”]
The most recent being ‘gelding’, ‘adfarch’, [/quote]
Hmm. Interesting. My “big” dictionary had ‘gelding’ from English but the Welsh words were both just words for ‘horse.’ It didn’t have ‘adfarch’ on the Welsh side at all. Hmm…
I need a translator mainly for minutes and agendas for meetings as it then helps me with understanding what’s being said during the meeting. I’m quite happy to struggle along with a dictionary if I just need single words and I have time to write a small amount for myself. Anyway it would seem the consensus it that Google is still the best. Thanks everyone
I’m pretty sure that you will find Google to be pretty good for rough translation from Welsh to English. It will have the same problem as many SSiWers (at least if you’re doing it right!), getting the wrong tenses in the heat of the moment, and translating unfamiliar idioms or sentence structures “word for word” instead of accounting for the difference between languages.
That said, when I have to write a bilingual document, I usually write the Welsh and run it through Google, then correct is, as Sionned suggests above - it gets enough right that the correction of mangles is far quicker than writing the English myself. So your minutes and agendas could work out well. A word of warning, though. If the minutes aren’t in full sentences, you may find Google getting quite confused!
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If GT can’t work out what a Welsh phrase means, sometimes “mymemory.translated” will find it. It’s a bit hit or miss though.
Just don’t try to translate things on FB when it says “view translation”. Even we, who are learners could do better.
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