I’ve picked a single paragraph of my recent essay on conversation in a foreign language, as it is a somewhat complex passage that was written naturally, without any bias of writing it for the purposes of a translation experiment. I’m curious about both directions of translation (English->Japanese and Japanese->English), and although choosing my native English as the target language would be easier to evaluate, for this post I’ve decided to just focus on English->Japanese this time. Nowadays we have things like Google Translate, a free service that translates between over 50 world languages, including Japanese.Īs someone who has spend a great deal of time learning Japanese, part of me gets a bit scared at the prospect of a machine translator that is even remotely close to that of a human.

Back when I first started studying Japanese, I wasn’t aware of any translation programs that worked between English and Japanese, and if there was I’m pretty sure they were very expensive and not very commonly used.

Google translate english to japan