Reply to post: Re: Try Irish names

Loose tongues and oily seamen: Lost in machine translation yet again

Mage Silver badge

Re: Try Irish names

Even if you hear them spoken, even in Ireland you ask how it is spelled, because there isn't one spelling for many "traditional names". But forget spelling properly for the Irish Health service which obviously uses 1970s software, can't do á é í ó ú Á É Í Ó Ú. Many names spelled without the accent (fada) are completely different words with different pronunciation.

Google Translate is pretty garbage for Irish or to send to a native speaker of a language you don't know. It's not too bad for your own use. It's dumb pattern matching from OCR text of books and documents. Maybe when Google illegally scans the Irish Harry Potter Translation and compares it to English it might improve. Mostly for Irish they have EU texts. That's what they started with.

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