Is this honestly a good site to translate?
I''m talking to my Mexican friend and I am looking on here to see what he is saying and its not right > is this honestly a good site to translate?
6 Answers
If you're using the dictionary function, this site cannot be beat. If you are using the translation function (where you would type in phrases or entire sentences), all translations are machine generated and as a result the answers are unreliable. All "translation sites" are machine generated translations and -as a result- your results will be unreliable. At leas Spanishdict has three translation sites that will work on your translation, so you have three possibilities from which to choose. It increases your probability of an accurate translation; however, let's face it, since languages are not always logical, some of the translations will be goofy.
I will add on to what mountaingirl said, this site offers tools that almost no other site does, and they're tools are always up to date here. Not to mention you have a community of spanish-speakers who love to teach, and even more people who are learning spanish and are advancing the spanish they already know and everyone loves to help any other avid spanish-learners here.
You will not find another site like this out there, I can guarantee it. You have the common members who help such as: Myself, Robertico, Marianne, Sunshinezmom (forgive my spelling), and of course many others (so please if your names not mentioned, don't get mad, these are just people I recently talked to)
And on top of that you have great, friendly admin who are always here to redirect, constructively criticize, correct, and teach everyone who cares to learn, such as: Heidita (mi amor y mi favorito 
), Eddy, and I'm thinking Moe (he maybe an unofficial admin but he's always helping), and of course many more who work behind the scenes like Paralee.
If you have a will to learn Spanish, then here at Span¡shD!ct, the sky is the limit with endless resources and advice that's free and live anytime/all the time. 
I will add that many people from Mexico (as in all countries) speak with regionalisms 
This site is for learning the official, recognized Spanish
The only time that you should put any faith in a machine-translation is when translating something into your own language. At least in this case, if the result is garbage/weird, there is a very good chance that you will recognize it as such. When translating from your own language, you may get nonsense and not even realize it.
That said, for "simple", "straightforward" sentences machines have a better success rate. Unfortunately, simple/straightforward are defined in terms of the machine's abilities, not the abilities of humans. In our daily life we use a huge number of idioms and many people (especially if they haven't studied other languages) think that their way of expressing something is "logical"/"easy-to-understand" when, in fact, it would make no/little sense to someone who speaks a different language.
Translations have always been a hard topic since no site will give you the exact translation of whatever you want to say or mean in a paragraph, text or sentence. I am a translator from Colombia and I know very well what this is.
We are quite a few Spanish natives in this site that can help you with your translations. The point is that you have to do your homework first and then we will be ready to help to get your translation as accurate as possible.
For English to Spanish, I have found that the second translation site ("Free Translation") does the best job. Babel fish sometimes seems to "babble" (especially if you have punctuation like apostrophes) and Google produces some very clunky translations. Free Translation seems to come pretty close.
