To be clear, I’m not talking about translating dialog such as “how are you” or “can you tell me where Barcelona is?” or anything equivalent of that instead, my main point is talking about translating the following types of dialog from English to Spanish involving:
- Profanity: “F*ck You!” used as a joke, rather than to offend
- Puns: As in terms that rhyme but consist of different words.
- Slang: I’m talking about colloqial speech or idioms
- Hyperbole: exaggerated dialog not meant to be literal
Like this for example: “I nearly died of embarrassment” but the translation put out “Casi me muero de vergüenza” which is just nonsense as it’s translated too literally (died > muero) when “died” is more on an idiomatic take on feeling embarrassed and emphasizes that the social blunder was incredibly awkward or uncomfortable. (Is the translation even right?)
BladeFederation@piefed.social 20 minutes ago
I used it extensively while flirting with a Mexican girl who eventually became my wife :) I understand Spanish a lot better now though I sometimes use a translator if she sends a wall of text because I’m lazy.
It’s not perfect, nothing really can be, particularly slang/idioms. It translates pretty literally, it’s a machine. Puns you’d have to pay attention to yourself, thr translator is not going to go “BTW did you notice she said x and then x? Clever!”
In your example it is up to you to interpret the meaning of an exaggeration. That’s pretty much exactly how you’d say it in English or Spanish in that situation.
Lastly I recommend Offline Translator by David Ventura these days. It is based on Mozilla Firefox’s tech, FOSS, no trackers, and is on F-Droid. It doesn’t take up too much space and is faster since it does it offline instead of sending to Google’s servers. I am trying to De-Google my life due to privacy concerns. Some people on this thread recommended DeepL, which I do not. The accuracy is pretty top tier, but it has an even worse privacy policy than Google.