2011/1/19 R. Ermers
<r.ermers@hccnet.nl>
If your acquaintance actually needs an accurate translation into Russian, I wonder why he would choose Google Translate for that. Remember that Russian has 7 cases, and a complex verbal system with many different forms, all of which need to be deduced by Google from the much poorer English prepositions and the verbal foms in the text. Even though the result will no doubt show cyrillic words, which looks interesting, the factual result will be rubbish, and most likely unintelligible to any Russian.
I do not know if he requires Russian, he was talking about Ukrainian. But that maybe has the same problems.
Automatic translation is always a problem. I even do not like the results from English to Dutch. But his reasoning is: 'better a badly translated document, as no document'. I am not sure if I agree 100%, but if that is what he wants, who am I to -keep- telling him he is wrong?