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US immigration uses Google Translate to scan people's social media for bad posts – Er, don't do that, says everyone else

jmch Silver badge

GT is generally good for single words or short phrases. As long as you have some knowledge of the languages in question and the context, you can fill in the blanks yourself. If you have absolutely zero knowledge of the language you're translating to, don't trust the output blindly!

In the last year or so I have been using deepL translator, it's much better than GT, being especially good at grabbing some context and adapting the translation. Of course, still far from perfect, but for people at beginner's level in one of the languages, it's a great tool.

Covering what another poster mentioned above with German technical translation, German constructions around negatives can be very particularly nuanced and it's easy for a beginner (or a machine translation) to mix up what is essentially a *do* with a *don't*

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