I use Google Translate extensively to help write things in Japanese - considered (one of) the most difficult languages in the world.
I show the results to Japanese people who nearly always tell me it looks just fine to them.
I have also passed off translations as my own work on tutoring sites like Lang8 and had natives correct "my work". They often will give a slightly different wording, but I have never had an "WTF does this mean?" type response.
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I think it is important to distinguish the difference between a perfect translation with nuance, and a simple "I need to make this point" translation that is what we need most of the time.
> [...] Japanese - considered (one of) the most difficult languages in the world.
Just in case, one of the most difficult languages to learn by native English speakers. It is pretty easy for Koreans for example---they share the same sentence order (subject-object-verb) and many words frequently share the etymology due to throughout Chinese influence.
More quantitively, Idibon had once catalogued [1] the weirdness of natural languages compared to others. English ranked 33rd place out of 239 languages. Quoting the original, "[p]art of this is to say that some of the languages you take for granted as being normal (like English, Spanish, or German) consistently do things differently than most of the other languages in the world".
>I think it is important to distinguish the difference between a perfect translation with nuance, and a simple "I need to make this point" translation that is what we need most of the time.
Isn't this exactly the point though? A different language in a different culture would convey an idea in a different way.
I'd love to know what exactly you're translating. I have experience with translations from work. I've never met a native speaker say that a translation was any good. Usually, "I understand the meaning but you would never say it that way."
I show the results to Japanese people who nearly always tell me it looks just fine to them.
I have also passed off translations as my own work on tutoring sites like Lang8 and had natives correct "my work". They often will give a slightly different wording, but I have never had an "WTF does this mean?" type response.
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I think it is important to distinguish the difference between a perfect translation with nuance, and a simple "I need to make this point" translation that is what we need most of the time.