Just wondering if there is a way to translate the text on a profile?

What I do is copy the text and then paste it into Google Translate ( https://translate.google.com ) or Thai2English ( http://www.thai2english.com/ )

 

Quite often the translation comes out incomprehensible, but I don't know of a better way to at least try to figure out what the user was saying.

Quite often the translation comes out incomprehensible, but I don't know of a better way to at least try to figure out what the user was saying.

 

I am not an expert linguist, so I wonder why the computer translations from Chinese are problematic and those from Thai are so incomprehensible. 

I think several issues come into play. Google Translate often gets individual words right, or at least most of them, but completely screws up the meaning of a sentence. Its Artificial Intelligence gets mostly trained with Western languages, so it cannot really make sense of Thai. Also, I would guess that the number of corrections they receive to improve results is quite low for Thai.

 

On top of that, many guys use slang expressions, misspell words or deliberately write them in a "cool" way in their profile texts.

 

On the bright side, after you've read and made sense of a few dozen profiles in Thai, it gets pretty repetitive from there. There's only so much guys typically share in a gay dating app profile, after all. We could actually make a collaborative effort to create a dictionary.

 it gets pretty repetitive from there.

 

Indeed it does.  Most of the time it's not going to be anything important enough to worry about.  Reading between the lines most of them say the usual "looking for boyfriend," "looking for love," or "Looking for fun." - Things like that.  Most of the 18-45 set are looking for money more than anything else.  I'm not saying that's bad.  I'm only saying that's generally the case.