Google Translate Hi there any English teachers or Chinese teachers!!!. I am an English teacher and I have a Chinese partner. Her English level is Intermediate B1 and I am a clumsy beginner in Chinese

Phil Palmer

Professional Teacher

Google Translate Hi there any English teachers or Chinese teachers!!!. I am an English teacher and I have a Chinese partner. Her English level is Intermediate B1 and I am a clumsy beginner in Chinese so we pretty much always converse in English. We get along great when things are great but communication can be a real problem when things go wrong between us. Some advice please. How good and true and reliable is Google Translate for turning English into Chinese (simplified) when talking about sensitive subjects, relationships, communication issues etc.? Thank you for any suggestions about Google Translate or a better alternative

May 24, 2019 2:42 AM

Comments · 8

Keep the sentences simple for google translate. The more complicated the sentence will lead to the higher likelihood of an incorrect translation. Keep trying to improve your Mandarin, so you don't have to be so reliant on translation services. Also avoid WeChat like the plague. WeChat will auto translate Chinese to English and English to Chinese, but it makes language learners on both sides lazy.

May 27, 2019

@Phil Palmer Google translate is not reliable when it comes to Chinese. I use it frequently before and then some of my Chinese students said that the translation is wrong, I felt a bit embarrassed.

May 27, 2019

I would suggest to try also Baidu translator (Chinese website, 百度), recently I noticed that it's a little bit better then Google translate. I actually use it with Russian-Chinese, but I suppose it should work out with English too.

May 27, 2019

Your question: "How good and true and reliable is Google Translate for turning English into Chinese (simplified) when talking about sensitive subjects, relationships, communication issues etc.?"

Chinese and English are extremely different. Good, true, reliable? Electronic translation still has a ton of room for improvement, especially when it comes to "sensitive subjects". I'd say any electronic translator is practically useless for what you've described. Google is probably the best, but MS Bing is almost as good, so you might as well use it for a second opinion. Baidu translation is probably even worse.

Why not try a little experiment? Translate something to Chinese with Google, and back to English with Bing.….

Good luck!

May 27, 2019