The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #73221   Message #1268157
Posted By: The Fooles Troupe
09-Sep-04 - 09:58 PM
Thread Name: BS: jOhn of Hull vindicated at last!
Subject: RE: BS: jOhn of Hull vindicated at last!
WYSIWYG,

The result you got is because those translation engines ignore 'special words' they have not been programmed to recognise. These can be people's names, place names, or as in this case misspellings.

They are just a big switch table with equivalents for all the languages - they can't handle any 'slang' that that have not been designed to cope with.

They will only have a decent chance of translation with words that are 'correctly spelt' according to their various language dictionaries - they may be set up to automatically cope with both British & US spelling, which spelling they give back on a translation back to English will depend on what they have been coded to do.

Try misspelling the foreign language words, then seeing what sort of mess you get back in English!

Robin