{"id":708,"date":"2010-08-10T07:45:40","date_gmt":"2010-08-10T07:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/?p=708"},"modified":"2010-08-10T07:45:40","modified_gmt":"2010-08-10T07:45:40","slug":"testing-out-gt4t-google-translate-for-translators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/testing-out-gt4t-google-translate-for-translators\/","title":{"rendered":"Testing out GT4T &#8211; Google Translate for Translators"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Testing  out GT4T<\/h2>\n<p align=\"center\"><em>By Alex Eames<\/em><\/p>\n<p>GT4T  stands for Google Translate for Translators. It&rsquo;s a neat little software  application written by English to Chinese translator Dallas Cao. Dallas has  also assisted Wenjer Leuschel with some translation of the last few <i class=\"tt\">tranfree<\/i> editions into Chinese.<\/p>\n<p>Two  things are under test here.<\/p>\n<p>1. How  well the program itself works<br \/>\n  2. How  well Google Translate works<\/p>\n<p>The download  is only 741 kb from here&#8230; <\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/dallascao.com\/gt4t_en\/downloads\/\">http:\/\/dallascao.com\/gt4t_en\/downloads\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>It  installed fine in Windows 7. I opted for the pro version, which works in all  programs. It is &ldquo;nagware&rdquo;, which means after the first 100 uses, it will  periodically ask you to register ($48 Pro version, $28 Word version) but will  still continue to function if you don&rsquo;t.<\/p>\n<p>The only  issue I had with it was that, once installed, when I tried to run it from the  start menu, it was already active. What I should have done was click on the clover icon in the system tray to set up the language pair and settings. (Within a few hours of sending a preview of this review, Dallas has updated the installer to give you a choice whether or  not to launch the program after installing.)<\/p>\n<p>So, once  I&rsquo;d set it to English-Polish and unchecked the &ldquo;Load on Windows Startup&rdquo; box, I  did a quick test.<\/p>\n<p>In Firefox&rsquo;s  built-in search box, I keyed in &ldquo;weather in lodz&rdquo;, selected it and hit CTRL-J.  It instantly substituted &ldquo;Pogoda w &#321;odzi&rdquo;. Good result! (Also note it corrected  the capitalization <img src=\"http:\/\/www.translatortips.net\/ubb\/smile.gif\" alt=\"smile\">)<\/p>\n<h3>Butterfly Names?<\/h3>\n<p>So far,  so good. I&rsquo;ve been photographing butterflies recently and am interested in  furthering my knowledge of their Polish names. So how does it cope with &ldquo;red  admiral&rdquo;? Not very well, as it happens. This is an issue with Google Translate,  not GT4T. This time, testing from Word 2007, it instantly returned &ldquo;Czerwony  admira<strong><u>l<\/u><\/strong>&rdquo;. It completely  ignored &ldquo;admiral&rdquo; and left it in English. The Polish for red is &ldquo;czerwony&rdquo; and  admiral is &ldquo;admira<strong><u>&#322;<\/u>&rdquo;<\/strong>. Sending  the word admiral on its own works correctly though.<\/p>\n<p>The  correct Polish term for a Red admiral butterfly is &ldquo;Rusa&#322;ka admira&#322;&rdquo;. In Latin it&rsquo;s  Vanessa atalanta. How does it cope with Latin?<\/p>\n<p>Oh, it  doesn&rsquo;t do Latin. That&rsquo;s a shame (although perhaps not as commercially valuable  as living languages).<\/p>\n<p>GT4T is  still working perfectly and Google is highlighting the pitfalls of machine  translation (MT). I&rsquo;d thought common butterfly names might be in the database,  but no.<\/p>\n<p>So I then  wondered what would happen if I punched in &ldquo;Vanessa atalanta&rdquo; (as if it were in  English) and tried to translate that into Polish. It came back with &ldquo;Rusa&#322;ka  admira&#322;&rdquo; whahay &ndash; it worked <img src=\"http:\/\/www.translatortips.net\/ubb\/smile.gif\" alt=\"smile\"> into Polish, but not into English <img src=\"http:\/\/www.translatortips.net\/ubb\/frown.gif\" alt=\"frown\">.<\/p>\n<p>Hmmm &ndash; so  Google does have some Latin text in the database, somewhere, but just won&rsquo;t  admit it <img src=\"http:\/\/www.translatortips.net\/ubb\/tongue.gif\" alt=\"razz\">.<\/p>\n<h3>Now Let&rsquo;s Try To Break It<\/h3>\n<p>Looking  for trouble, I tried it in Eudora when typing an email. GT4T doesn&rsquo;t work very  well in Eudora &#8211; returning a bunch of HTML text (but does work properly in the  email subject line).<\/p>\n<p>You can  redefine the hotkeys in GT4T to make them compatible with any applications you  use. Since CTRL-J is used for junking an email in Eudora, I thought that might  be the issue, so I changed the hotkey. It still didn&rsquo;t help.<\/p>\n<p>No  matter. It&rsquo;s doubtful I would ever want to use GT4T in Eudora anyway, I just  wanted to test a few different applications to see what would happen.<\/p>\n<h3>Summary<\/h3>\n<p>Overall, I am impressed with GT4T. It&rsquo;s such a  simple little tool, but gives you quick and easy access to a large online  multilingual dictionary, with one key press, from any application. And it works  without slowing down the computer or taking up lots of system resources. I  suggest you give it a try and see if it suits you.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><!-- ROUNDED CORNERS TABLE START alex promo yellow box--><\/p>\n<table width=\"500\" align=\"center\" cellpadding=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" border=\"0\" style=\"background-color: #ffffc6\">\n<tr>\n<td width=\"14\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/translatortips.net\/images\/top-left.gif\" width=\"14\" height=\"14\" border=\"0\" alt=\"...\"><\/td>\n<td width=\"472\"><\/td>\n<td width=\"14\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/translatortips.net\/images\/top-right.gif\" width=\"14\" height=\"14\" border=\"0\" alt=\"...\"><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><\/td>\n<td align=\"center\">\n<p>Alex Eames is the founder of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.translatortips.com\">translatortips.com<\/a>, editor of <i class=\"tt\">tranfree<\/i> and author of the eBooks&#8230;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.translatortips.net\/ht50.html\">How to Earn $80,000+ Per Year as a <br \/>Freelance Translator<\/a><br \/> and<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/translatortips.net\/sell-your-services.html\">Selling Your Professional Services on the Web<\/a><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/translatortips.net\/images\/bottom-left.gif\" width=\"14\" height=\"14\" border=\"0\" alt=\"...\"><\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<td><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/translatortips.net\/images\/bottom-right.gif\" width=\"14\" height=\"14\" border=\"0\" alt=\"...\"><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p><!-- ROUNDED CORNERS TABLE END alex promo yellow box--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GT4T is Google Translate for Translators. It&#8217;s a neat little software program that allows you to access the full might of Google Translate inside any software application with a single keypress. Reviewed here in tranfree 72.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,7,8],"tags":[53,54],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}