Where to go next?

daved wrote:yes, I agree....but they don't reply to those either!...or when they do reply to your carefully crafted German they reply in English..

As you have previously read I do not really go to Austria, but the French and the Italians are still up for making a few bob, never had an email not replied to, when I was organizing my last trip to Switzerland all the hotels replied, I guess I'm just lucky, or is that another reason you have just given me for not going to Austria. :lol: :shock: :lol: :shock:

daved wrote:yes, I agree....but they don't reply to those either!...or when they do reply to your carefully crafted German they reply in English..

Thats funny, as all my correspondence with hotels in Austria has previously been undertaken in German.

Ian Wickham wrote:
This is a personal preference, but I always translate my emails into the receiving language, a sign of respect more than any thing else.... 8)

That's OK if you do speak the language, if you're running through Google translator or Babelfish etc then it's not a great idea, they produce such horrible langue it's nearly impossible to read.

ise wrote:

Ian Wickham wrote:
This is a personal preference, but I always translate my emails into the receiving language, a sign of respect more than any thing else.... 8)

That's OK if you do speak the language, if you're running through Google translator or Babelfish etc then it's not a great idea, they produce such horrible langue it's nearly impossible to read.

Agreed it is not the perfect translation, and I would not want to translate anything for business using babelfish, but it suffices for a holiday booking.

Ian Wickham wrote:
Agreed it is not the perfect translation, and I would not want to translate anything for business using babelfish, but it suffices for a holiday booking.

It really, really doesn't, they produce language that's nearly unreadable and it's always obvious where it's come from. If you can do a greeting and sign-off in the host language that's going to look just fine, forcing someone to decode what ends up as nonsense speak can be irritating.

I use Babelfish quite a lot, and it seems to do the job quite adequately so long as you pay attention to the structure and content of your sentences.

If you are using free translations or something with limited knowledge of (in my case German) grammar and wording then it can produce pretty useful stuff but from my limited knowledge I can see that a straight translation from the website just looks odd. For example if you get your translation and then put it through a German-->English translator the difference is quite remarkable.

Edit: Pretty much what bandit said^^ too slow!!

ise wrote:

Ian Wickham wrote:
Agreed it is not the perfect translation, and I would not want to translate anything for business using babelfish, but it suffices for a holiday booking.

It really, really doesn't, they produce language that's nearly unreadable and it's always obvious where it's come from. If you can do a greeting and sign-off in the host language that's going to look just fine, forcing someone to decode what ends up as nonsense speak can be irritating.

I have always used the babelfish, when I have translated stuff from French to english, It is not perfect but it is readable.