Japanese Translation?

[Thunder Chicken]

Is anyone familiar with any passably good online translation between English and Japanese? I have been attempting to have a conversation with a person in Hokkaido regarding a Honda race car driver name Tojiro Ukiya, who apparently was a well known racer back in the 60's. My father knew him for a time, and I understand that my father was mentioned in one of Ukiya's autobiographies.

I have used Babelfish and Excite Japan.com - both with comedic results, and I hope that I have not inadvertently restarted WWII in the Pacific due to a missed translation.

It seems that these translators have problems with sentence structure, so even simple sentences get mangled pretty badly.

For example, here is the English input to Babelfish:

Is anyone familiar with any passably good online translation between English and Japanese?
​

Here is the Japanese translation out of Babelfish (looks Japanese!):

だれでも英語と日本語間のあらゆる通過可能によいオンライン翻訳をよく知られているか。​

Here is the Babelfish translation of the Japanese output back into English:

Anyone all passing between English and Japanese has known possibly good online translation well?
​

Now this was a reasonably straightforward sentence. Attempting to talk about my father's history (which is fairly complex), well, it gets mangled beyond all comprehension. I don't have any experience with pay translation services and I'd prefer not to shell out hundreds of bucks for a few sentences if there is an alternative.

Any ideas, anyone?

 

[tl8]

Buy a human translator. Japanese is a hard language to translate, to English because in English there are exceptions to rules where as the Japanese always follow them.

Most Japanese should understand English as well.

 

[Quick_Nick]

I'm not saying it's a good one but if you just want to compare free services, one site that I use is freetranslation.com
From your sentence it gives the following
"Is someone familiarized with the translation of the fairly good online between English and Japanese?"

 

[sputnik]

Double translation is notoriously hard for machine translators; even "simple" languages don't do very well. Try it....

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Buy a human translator. Japanese is a hard language to translate, to English because in English there are exceptions to rules where as the Japanese always follow them.

Most Japanese should understand English as well.

I was hoping that they would know some English, but the people that I have made contact with seem to be elderly and don't know very much.

It seems that most of the services that I have seen require $30-$40 for 1 page/1000 characters to be translated. I'm basically trying to have a conversation to get some basic information on a Japanese forum, maybe 200 characters of non-technical informal text.