Chinese Translator

What a machine translation of Chinese is good for

Machine translation between Chinese and English has become genuinely useful, and it remains genuinely unreliable, and both halves of that sentence matter. It is excellent at telling you what a text is about. It is poor at telling you exactly what it says, and it is worst precisely where Chinese is least like English: no tense endings, no plurals, subjects left unsaid when they are obvious, and a heavy use of set four-character expressions whose meaning is not the sum of their parts.

So use it for what it does well. Getting the gist of an article, deciding whether a page is worth reading properly, understanding a message quickly. Do not use it for anything that will be printed, sent to someone who matters, or tattooed.

When you need to be sure, the annotation tool is the better companion: it shows you the words themselves rather than a guess at the sentence, and the dictionary is one click away from each of them.