Translate emails
How do I take a email sent to me in Spanish and translate it into English
2 Answers
Alvin8937:
Jtdaniels' response to you was very good and is exactly what I would recommend as a first step. Well, almost. I would probably have recommended that you just use Google Translate as you can usually get the gist from just one machine translator and it is easy to paste a large amount of text into GT.
The next step is the following:
Having read the translation on Google Translate, make a note of the sentences that don't seem to make a lot of sense. This occurs primarily because there are many meanings of individual Spanish words (as in English) and GT has to "pick a horse" and is not smart enough (yet) to pick the best one, given the context of the entire text. For these sentences, look up the Spanish words that may have been mistranslated by GT in the SD dictionary and see if you can find an English word that fits the situation better.
There are also many compound verbs and three or four word phrases in Spanish which can be difficult for a machine translator to translate and they will often translate the individual words (instead of the phrase) and miss the point entirely. Over time, if you use this process a lot (and study Spanish in a rigorous way) you will learn about these compound verbs and phrases.
Good luck. Enjoy the journey.
You can copy the text of the email and paste it into the search box on the home page of this site. That will get you three machine translations. Generally, machine translations aren't very good, but if you compare the three (and maybe the translation at translate.google.com), you'll surely get the gist.
