Bing Translator vs. Google Translator gives some surprises...

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2013/11/04 06:20 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2013/11/04/10462249.aspx

It is a point I have made before in blogs like Google doesn't seem to get blogs and Not for use on unexplained calf pain, blogs from the distant past...but it has been a while, so I decided to look at another side of the same problem, comparing Google to Bing...

So I recently had an opportunity to do a comparison of Bing's translation skills versus Google's, when a Dev evangelist from Windows Phone 8 in Japan wrote a blog about the feature, and I noticed some very interesting things.

First, here is his blog:

Windows Phone における地域設定とその取得

Now, you can try to run them through:

Second

You will get some interesting surprises!

First of all, the Google translator is faster.

While at first this may seem like a win for them, it is actually a lose; the coolest part about an auto translator is *watching* the translation happen, and they lose this right out of the gate. I almost wonder whether we could use this technique for some localized products!
Second of all, there are the defaults:

Bing defaults to From=auto-detect and To=my language.

Google defaults to two huge lists where From=my language and To=some random language down the list, in my case Hebrew.

maybe they are in translation business now or something, but pretty much every translation that a regular *user* has works the way Bing has it. Bing:2, Google:0.
Third of all, translation quality varies so much between them, that you almost have to run them both, depending on the subject.

So no points for either of them, sometimes.

Microsoft happens to win this one too, in my humble opinion (translatability on their minds, perhaps? 😏😏😏)
And one more time: Bing:3, Google:0!!!

You almost have to feel bad for them! Almost! 😏😏

I'm just so struck by how *bad* Google is at this. It is almost like they know people are doing amateur translation work and they aren't even trying to help the customers, here!

Ah well, we will just have to go on being more awesome than them. The best kept secret on the Internet!

Sssh! Don't tell anyone, you hear? 😏😏😏

J on 4 Nov 2013 3:40 PM:

This comparison cant be serious.....

S on 4 Nov 2013 9:12 PM:

To be fair, it did say "dubious value"

Shawn Steele on 5 Nov 2013 9:31 AM:

You forgot to list that Bing does Klingon too! www.bing.com/translator

(Knowing Michael though he might not consider that a plus).

Alex Cohn on 5 Nov 2013 12:24 PM:

This being an MSDN blog, or because there is so much C#, my Chrome does not recognize this page as Japanese, and does not offer automatic translation. But luckily, it does remember my last preference of "from" and "to" languages on Google Translate. (In my case, "from" was "Detect language").

The result was just as good as one could hope for such technical article: C# was translated to Java^H^H^H^H^H… still readable.

GregM on 11 Nov 2013 5:20 PM:

Sorry Michael, but I have to disagree with both of your "scoring" points. First, slower is not a win. I don't want to watch the page get translated, that's not useful. Second, Google Translate, in my experience, defaults to either what you used last, if it knows who you are, or "detect language" to "my language" otherwise.

Also, why are you comparing the mobile Google Translate site to the normal Bing translate site?

Please consider a donation to keep this archive running, maintained and free of advertising.
Donate €20 or more to receive an offline copy of the whole archive including all images.

go to newer or older post, or back to index or month or day