Mine is not good either i am just using Yahoo! Babel Fish - Text Translation and Web Page Translation

I wonder how accurate it is..
Most translators are bad at German. Dictionary.com has one and it is lame.

Even Babelfish translates the word Mine as a pit.

I have used Babelfish quite a few times, its a long way from perfect but it is a lot better than my german

I use Google Translate.

Wer hat hier eigentlich Deutsch als Muttersprache so wie ich?

Es ist gar nicht so leicht deutsch zu sprechen...ich sehe da viele Rechtschreibfehler.

Naja, wenn ihr was wissen wollt, dann fragt mich jederzeit. Ich kann Euch sicher helfen, richtig zu übersetzen.

Ja ich!

Grüße aus Deutschland. Wo kommst denn her yohan?

Oh and btw the translations via bablefish are hard to read. You get the meaning but it is far away from good German....but than again it is probably a language which is hard to perfect if you are not a native.

All the automatic translations are poor, not just English-German. It's because languages are ambiguous and context-sensitive, they require interpretation. As I'm sure you know, automated processes cannot handle that well.

By the way, it's been more than 30 years since I had German classes. I had good grades, but even in those days - the 70s - the lessons focused mostly on learning how to read. We didn't practice writing or speaking or even listening much.

Fortunately, my parents watched German television a lot, because it often had American movies on late at night, sometimes double bills. Mostly classics from the 40s, 50s and 60s. James Steward, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire etc. We loved it, in spite of the fact that it was dubbed. German voice actors are pretty good in my opinion.

Your right on translation.

We indeed have good German voice actors (unlike turkey where once ever movie was dubbed by 2 male persons), most successful movies here are from the USA (I like Bruce Willis German voice btw). Somehow I like the arrogance from Americans though to just redo a good movie instead of dubbing it. "The Vanishing", "Funny Games" or "Night Watch" comes to mind.

Your parents were German?

Ich komme aus Oesterreich - nicht weit weg von Wien, aber ich lebe schon seit mehr als 30 Jahren in Japan. Liebe Gruesse...

Dutch. But they liked German television. More entertainment than Dutch public television (in those days commercial television didn't exist yet over here). My mother in particular. She liked the shows where they sing 'Schlager'.