Google Translate
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“So I use Google Translate when I need to translate sentences I don't know.”
“I use Google Translate quite a lot and it's pretty good even for obscure languages.”
Show 2 more
“we have some that have very high bar of engineering (firefox, google translate)”
“my recommendation is to use Google Translate (or something similar) that does a good but quite literal translation.”
Caveats and dissent
“these days it "interprets" way too much, confabulating like an LLM”
“how Google translate assumes "Anh" means "brother"”
Show 1 more
“there never was even a single sentence that I could let exactly as generated by "Google translate".”
Often compared with
1 moved from DeepL to Google Translate
1 moved from Google Translate to DeepL
1 moved from Google Translate to Kagi Translate
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?" 2 mentions
- Meta's Muse is fantastic for web scraping 1 mention
- When did Google get so weird? 1 mention
- The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs 1 mention
- Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure" 1 mention
- Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026) 1 mention
Data: google-translate.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 17
“Back in the 2010s I used Google Translate for years to scrape hard targets like LinkedIn”
“these days it "interprets" way too much, confabulating like an LLM”
“how Google translate assumes "Anh" means "brother"”
“there never was even a single sentence that I could let exactly as generated by "Google translate".”
“found myself jumping between ChatGPT and Google Translate”
“translation. https://translate.google.com/”
“So I use Google Translate when I need to translate sentences I don't know.”
“I'm actually using Google Translate and Papago (a Korean translator) to translate them.”
“using Google Translate for almost two decades now”
“I use Google Translate quite a lot and it's pretty good even for obscure languages.”
“we used to paste uncooperative sentences into Google Translate”
“The neural Google Translate, while still far from perfect, was suddenly useful for some purposes.”
“using Google Translate”
“we have some that have very high bar of engineering (firefox, google translate)”
“I use Google Translate (literally the same architecture, last I heard), and when it works, great.”
“my recommendation is to use Google Translate (or something similar) that does a good but quite literal translation.”
“better for me than Google Translate”