Tag: french

Death of a translation tool

I translate from French to English, and one of the tools I use is https://context.reverso.net. You search for a phrase and it returns 10-20 examples of that phrase in both languages, in context, pulled from the Internet. It is so helpful for idiomatic translations, because it lets you quickly see how others have rendered it in different contexts. For example, I once used it to see how others have translated the French phrase “Et hop!,” which is one of those all-purpose phrases that, in different contexts, can mean “There you go,” “Done,” “Presto,” “Up you go!” etc. However, in the last year the results have gotten noticeably worse: literal translations are crowding out the idiomatic ones, because of the huge amount of auto-translated text online.

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