Eh, it's not that great. It's neat that it translates as you type stuff out, but for Japanese, it's still pretty off.

For example, take the sentence 「日本語が話せる？」

This means "Can you speak Japanese?" (literally "Able to speak Japanese?").

The translator gives me "Speak Japanese?"

This is because in Japanese, often the subject of the sentence ("You", in this situation) is dropped. Normally, a person wouldn't name the person they're talking to in this sentence, unless of course it was the first thing you said to the person and you were in a crowd of people (thus, letting them know you were speaking to them and not someone else).

If I throw in something to make it LITERALLY say "Are you able to speak Japanese?" (「あなたは日本語が話せる」), the translator says "You speak Japanese?".

Still not quite there. >_>"";

~DS

It can be enough to get a general idea of what's going on, but it will completely butcher any meaningful dialog or narrative. However, it's GREAT for navigating foreign websites.

I played around with it for a bit, and I was really underwhelmed. A lot of stuff was really far off the mark. However, your particular problem with Nihongo ga hanseru? stems from the translator not taking kindly to informality and slang. I ran the "proper" phrase Nihongo ga hanseru n desu ka, and it came back as "Do you speak Japanese?", which is spot on. I found that generally I got way better results if I phrased things properly, and avoided all kinds of slang.

That said, I ran random sentences of interest from a script I'm working on for about an hour, and I mostly I got back incomprehensible stuff. In thruth, I ran sentences I assumed would bring issues, but the resulst were nevertheless alarmingly underwhelming. I can however see how it might be of use to people with aboslutely no knowledge of Japanese for very rudimentary sentences, but those with even the slightest understanding of grammar would probably be better off using some form of eletronic dictionary. As long as you can work out where words begin and end, and have some knowledge of what the particles do, you'll get far more out of using word processor with pop-up dictionary etc., than you'll get out of google translate. At least for now.

You don't really want a sentient computer, do you?

Totally, I wasn't saying that it's not a major fault that it doesn't fare better with informal/short forms, just that it seems to be having a problem with it.

I'll also grant you the point that the proper/polite way of saying exactely what you said is indeed 「日本語が話せますか。」, however 「日本語が話せるんですか。」 is an equally good choice, and in my experience is the more likely variant, however my experiences could be off, I suppose. Both are polite choices, it all comes down to whether you need the 「ん」.

Sure, I meant more common between those two phrasings. If I can nominate others, by far the most common question I encountered was simply 「日本語喋る？」.

http://www.ocn.ne.jp/translation/ translates that as "Can you speak Japanese?"