Alas, I can't speak for Bulgarian, but I had a look at the Spanish and Japanese translations for your last search, and they were both accurate. I also tried "linguist" and "ridiculous", and got translations I know to be acceptable (although I can't vouch for all of the Japanese translations; my command of the language isn't that good). I wouldn't be surprised if they simply had much better references available for those languages than Bulgarian, though.

Well, yes, the bulk of the translations are acceptable (if not always directly on target); the point is that the rate of failure is high enough that you can't depend on the site to give you the word you need. If you have a bookcase full of foreign-language dictionaries, as I do, you can check and verify... but then you don't need the site, do you? I'm aware that it would be prohibitively expensive (and/or take forever) to have people go through the words they skim from their online lexica and weed out the ringers, but the result is that it's not that helpful.

lackadaisy!

Well, "whale" is used colloquially to mean "beat", so that explains most of the Bulgarian entry, does it not?

I find it impossible to believe that you don't already know that, but at the same time find it odd you didn't elude to that in the discussion, so hey.

Their translation of the shit into Danish must the result of some mistake. 'Junk' is slang for drugs!
(And so is 'shit', by the way). A reasonable translation of shit into Danish: 'Lort'.

But is "whale" used colloquially to mean "beat" in Bulgarian? I think Languagehat gets a pass on that one.

And "shit" in Dutch refers to certain cannabis products.

Of course I know that. My point is that the likelihood of someone's using an English-Bulgarian translation tool to look up "whale" in the sense of 'whale on, beat' is infinitesimal compared to the likelihood of their wanting to know the Bulgarian for 'a whale,' and the entry is useless for the latter. In fact, if you try a number of words you'll find that a great many of the renderings are translations of some synonym of the desired word, often fairly uncommon. This is a problem of using automatic lexicon searching without human input.

*kof* Hoity-toity! Lackaday! I have ystruck mine finger with a hammer.

And this is useful how exactly?

Err, isn't that exactly the point of our host's post?

Good to see cooments about a first draft of a site I just put up a few months ago (I am the editor of www.websters-online-dictionary.org). The debate over the translations is justified. I am racing to add as many as possible. I am doing a meta analysis across translations, which has its flaws. We will be adding some 2.9 million more words and will sort the table outputs by most frequently encountered (less frequent translations will come last). As time goes on, the results will converge to better translations. Since the EU uses many "drug-related" translations of "shit" and other words, strange results apear as I relied in part on the EU.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments. Phil

Ah, that's good to know. Sorry to sound so snarky in my post, but I was reacting to an enthusiastic recommendation by La Grande Rousse, and felt a little let down. I look forward to further improvements; it's certainly a promising tool.