What does this say?

[azz19]

ちつちやりけど すごりんだよ
It's hard to translate because there's no kanji.

 

[Toritoribe]

You mixed up い with り, っ with つ, ゃ with や.

ちっちゃいけど すごいんだよ。

Does this make sense?

 

[azz19]

Thanks. I should have looked more carefully.
Now it makes more sense when I put it through a translator.
"I'm great little bitty." does anyone agree that it says this?
Also just out of curiosity how is it written with kanji?

 

[Mike Cash]

So for things in kanji you can translate them without putting them through a translator? But something as basic as this throws you?

 

[azz19]

No, I just find that translators work better with kanji.
Although this seemed to work okay it the translator.
But I was only asking what it would be in kanji out of curiosity.
Just wanted to see what kanji would of been used. ^^

 

[nekojita]

The translation is wrong. Don't use Google translate for anything except:
1. getting a very vague idea of what a text says in your native language
2. having a laugh

Any dictionary (e.g. try searching for WWWJDIC) should tell you what kanji can be used for a word if you input the kana (often more than one option exists), but sometimes the kanji are actually not used that often.

I checked out of curiosity - kanji doesn't make it any better, although switching out ちっちょい for something like ちいさい improves the translation a lot. Google use a statistical algorithm, which is why it can fall over like this even when the structure is something simple like AけどB.

Statistical algorithms use large bodies of parallel text to train on, which tend to be heavily weighted towards written and formal language - e.g. Canadian parliament records are available in both English and French, the EU put out official documents in multiple European languages, Hong Kong puts out documents in both English and Chinese.

That's why they don't work so well on phrases containing words like ちっちょい which probably don't appear that often in the input texts.

(I was just reading a paper where they searched for webpages that had multiple language versions and used those as parallel texts to feed a search engine translator - e.g. search "architecture in Berlin" in English, get returned appropriate pages in German with the option to translate them back to English. Things like this are harder than people think because computers are much stupider than people think).

Sorry for the digression - machine translation is an interest of mine.

 

[azz19]

Thanks. That's very interesting.
I checked out WWWJDIC and it does seem to be a lot better than the other translation sites out there.
I would like to actually lean Japanese but I always get bored and stop. It would be alot easier if I was in a situation where I have to learn.

 

[Mike Cash]

Oh, there's the problem. Since this is the LEARNING JAPANESE subforum we just naturally assume you're learning Japanese.

 

[azz19]

ye, sorry about that. guess I posted in the wrong place.
where should I post something like this in the future?

 

[Mike Cash]

There's no specific subforum for that, but we do have a sticky thread for just such requests: Need a word or phrase translated?.

 

[azz19]

Thanks. I'll use that thread in the future.