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February 7[edit]

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Are you permitted to use google translate to translate a page from German wikipedia into English wiki? If so, do u have to give attribution? 79.67.86.124 (talk) 20:13, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The quality of Google Translate is not high enough to use without serious review and revision of the result. If your translation skills do not suffice to do the job without using Google Translate, it is likely they are also not quite at the level needed for this review and revision. Rather than replacing the human translator, Google Translate, if properly used, can help you save some time. After proper revision, the text will probably be sufficiently different that attribution issues are moot. It might be different if Google Inc. did and published the translation. --Lambiam 23:05, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It might be a good idea to run this by the Language ref desk, complete with a link to the German version of the article, and see what any German-speakers might come up with. As Lamb I Am (a cousin to Sam?) suggests, Google Translate is only a guideline, and can't be blindly trusted to give a good translation. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:17, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Also, try Bing Microsoft Translator too, which sometimes does a better job. Alansplodge (talk) 23:29, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You probably will want to see Wikipedia:Translation. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 04:30, 8 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Good link. Particularly this point: "Wikipedia consensus is that an unedited machine translation, left as a Wikipedia article, is worse than nothing.". RudolfRed (talk) 01:53, 9 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]