Google Translate Blog
The official source for news on Google's translation technologies
The Polish Ministry of Economy goes multi-lingual with Google Translate
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Google Translate team is always thinking about how to make information accessible to all internet users, not matter what language it is written in. Often people come across webpages in foreign languages, but don’t know that they can go to
Google Translate
to find out what the page says. This problem is especially challenging for government institutions that have wide audiences and information that needs to be translated into multiple languages. The
Polish Ministry of Economy
recently solved this problem by using our
website translation element
to make their
webpage
multilingual for visitors who don’t speak Polish.
By embedding the
website translation element
, the Ministry enabled visitors to translate site text instantly without leaving the Ministry’s webpage. With the addition of the Google Translate drop-down box, their webpages are now accessible to Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish speakers who don’t have any knowledge of Polish at all!
While the translation quality is not perfect, it is good enough to allow visitors who don’t speak Polish to interact in a way they never could have before. Check out the Ministry’s site or add the
website translation element
to your own webpage!
Posted by Andrew Gomez, Associate Product Marketing Manager
Goal! Gol! гол! Hadaf! - Football fans around the globe break down language barriers
Friday, June 11, 2010
Football is one of the truly global languages. Throughout the decades, fans have cheered, argued and shared tears as their teams have swept to victory with a wonder-goal in extra-time, or crumbled under the pressure of a penalty shootout. While emotions etched onto the faces of spectators are all too easy to read, verbally communicating across languages can be difficult. The BBC World Service now offers a way to break down these language barriers through
World Cup Team Talk
, which uses Google’s machine translation technology.
Back in March, the BBC World Service
launched an experiment
using Google Translate to explore the transformative power of the Internet and facilitate real-time discussion across languages. On
SuperPower Nation Day
, BBC World Service readers from around the world were invited to discuss the Nation Day event online—and have their comments translated live for others to read.
Although translations were not always perfect, people found the project useful and engaging—and its success inspired the BBC World Service to run another campaign to allow football fans from across the globe to join in conversation around the
beautiful game
.
Starting on June 11, football fans across the world will be able to contribute to a global conversation in 11 languages—Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, English, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Vietnamese and Welsh—and receive replies from fellow fans that are automatically translated back into their native language by Google Translate. The posts will also appear on an interactive map so people can see where in the world the contributions are coming from.
On the other side of the pond,
the Boston Globe
has
integrated Google Translate
into each article on its
Corner Kicks
soccer blog to extend the site’s reach across a multi-lingual readership, locally in New England and worldwide.
The Globe
is no stranger to translation tools. Its award-winning photography blog
The Big Picture
also uses Google Translate for automatically translating summaries and captions and for approving comments from around the world, including its
introduction to the World Cup
.
With that, let the games begin—
in whatever language you want
.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager
Five more languages on translate.google.com
Thursday, May 13, 2010
At Google, we are always trying to make information more accessible, whether by adding
auto-captioning on YouTube
and
virtual keyboards to search
or by providing free translation of text, websites and documents with
Google Translate
. In 2009,
we announced
the addition of our first “alpha” language, Persian, on Google Translate. Today, we are excited to add five more alpha languages: Azerbaijani, Armenian, Basque, Urdu and Georgian — bringing the total number of languages on Google Translate to 57.
These languages are available while still in alpha status. You can expect translations to be less fluent than for our other languages, but they should still help you understand the multilingual web. We are working hard to “graduate” these new language out of alpha status, just as we did some time ago with Persian. You can help us improve translation quality as well. If you notice an incorrect translation, we invite you click "Contribute a better translation". If you are a translator, then you can contribute
translation memories
with the
Translator Toolkit
. This helps us build better machine translation systems especially for languages that are not well represented on the web.
Collectively, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Georgian and Urdu have roughly 100 million speakers. We hope that these speakers can now more easily access the entire multilingual web in their own language. Try translating these and other languages at
translate.google.com
. Here are some phrases from the new alpha languages to get you started:
Baietz lehenengoan
میں خوش قسمت محسوس کر رہا ہوں
բախտաւոր եմ զգում
Mən şanslıyam
იღბალს მივენდობი
Posted by Ashish Venugopal, Research Scientist
Giving a voice to more languages on Google Translate
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
One of the popular features of Google Translate is the ability to hear translations spoken out loud (”text-to-speech”) by clicking the speaker icon beside some translations, like the one below.
We rolled this feature out for English and Haitian Creole translations a few months ago and added French, Italian, German, Hindi and Spanish
a couple of weeks ago
. Now we’re bringing text-to-speech to even more languages with the open source speech synthesizer,
eSpeak
.
By integrating eSpeak we’re adding text-to-speech functionality for Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.
You may notice that the audio quality of these languages isn’t at the same level as the previously released languages. Clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect, but we will continue to improve the performance and number of languages that are supported.
So go ahead and give it a try! Click the on the speaker icon for any of these translations:
“airport” in Greek
,
“lightning” in Chinese
or
“smile” in Swahili
.
Posted by Fergus Henderson, Software Engineer
Translate the real world with Google Goggles
Monday, May 10, 2010
(This was posted on the
Google Mobile Blog
on 5/6/2010)
Traveling to another country can be an amazing experience. The opportunity to immerse yourself in a different culture can give you a new perspective. However, it can be hard to fully enjoy the experience if you do not understand the local language. For example, ordering food from a menu you can not read can be an adventure. Today we are introducing a new feature of
Google Goggles
that will prove useful to travelers and
monoglots
everywhere: Goggles translation.
Here’s how it works:
Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words
Press the shutter button
If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate
Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages
Google Goggles in action (click images to see large version)
The
first Goggles translation prototype
was unveiled earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and could only recognize German text. Today Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages. We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages. Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well.
Every new release of Google Goggles contains at least one new feature and a large number of improvements to our existing functionality. In addition to translation, Goggles v1.1 features improved barcode recognition, a larger corpus of artwork, recognition of many more products and logos, an improved user interface, and the ability to initiate visual searches using images in your phone’s photo gallery.
Computer vision is a hard problem. While we are excited about Goggles v1.1, we know that there are many images that we cannot yet recognize. The Google Goggles team is working on solving the technical challenges required to make computers see. We hope you are as excited as we are about the possibilities of visual search.
Google Goggles v1.1 is available on devices running Android 1.6 and higher. To download, please scan the QR code below or go to the Android Market app on your phone and search for “Google Goggles”. See our
help center
for more information.
Posted by Alessandro Bissacco, Software Engineer
100,000 language pairs and advanced features in Translator Toolkit
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Last week, we launched a variety of features on
Google Translator Toolkit
, Google’s easy-to-use translation aid.
100,000 language pairs.
Now you can translate from
345 source languages into 345 target languages
in Translator Toolkit. For example, you can translate from Welsh into Spanish or Māori into Chinese.
Open translation as a Google document.
When you’ve completed your translation, you can publish your translation into
Google Docs
. From Docs, you can invite other users to edit or view the translation, or you can publish your translation as a web page.
Spell check.
Translator Toolkit now supports spell check, so you can verify the spelling of your translations.
Colored segments.
To help you translate even faster, you can now customize your translation view so that, for example, machine-translated text is red, ‘high-fuzzy’ match (or near-perfect) translations are orange, and human translations are black. By customizing your view, you can quickly spot the text that needs the most work.
Translation statistics.
When you create a new translation, we now calculate translation scope, which shows the number of untranslated words, machine translated words, ‘high-fuzzy’ match words, and perfect translation memory words in your translation. Translation statistics can help you figure out how much work you’ll need to do to create the perfect translation even before you get started.
Split and merge segments.
Sometimes one sentence in one language translates to two sentences in another language. For example, the English sentence,
Jen is a huge Dalí fan and she wanted to hit both Figueras and Cadaqués, two must-sees on her itinerary.
translates into two sentences in Chinese:
简是一个超级的达利爱好者。
她想去Figueras和Cadaqués，两个她行程中的必经之地。
By splitting the segment, advanced users can improve leverage in their translation memories. Similarly, we also allow users to merge segments, so advanced users can rearrange sentences to create the perfect translation.
Check out these latest features in
Translator Toolkit
and
let us know
what you think.
Posted by Srinidhi Viswanatha, Software Engineer
Helping you read and write foreign scripts with Google Transliteration and Script Converter
Friday, April 23, 2010
For many Internet users, it is not always easy to write in languages that use unique character sets like Hindi, Hebrew and Arabic. Most computer keyboards only allow for the input of Roman characters (the alphabet used by most Western languages) and converting between scripts can be difficult. To make this process easier we launched an improved version of
Google Transliteration
at the end of last year, a service which enables you to phonetically convert Roman letters into a variety of other scripts.
Today we’re delighted to announce support for five new languages:
Amharic
,
Tigrinya
,
Hebrew
,
Oriya
and
Sinhalese
. This bring the total up to 22 languages spoken across Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. These new languages are currently available at
http://www.google.com/transliterate
.
Since you can’t use Google Transliteration offline we also launched the transliteration based
“Input Method Editor” (IME)
earlier this year. Once you
download and install
the Google Transliteration IME (don’t worry, it's free), you can type a word the way it sounds using Roman characters and the software will convert the word to its native script. For example, typing "hamesha" in Google Hindi IME transliterates into Hindi as: हमेशा.
As an improvement to the IME, we’ve recently added 5 more languages (Amharic, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian and Tigrinya) as well as
canonical schemes
,
macros
and support for Windows 64-bit. You can read about all these powerful new features on the
Google Transliteration IME help page
.
Now what if you come across a language that you can speak but can’t read? For example, if you can speak Hindi, you may know that “namaste” is a greeting, however you may not be able to read ‘नमस्ते’ in Hindi script. Our new
Script Converter
tool converts a given web page or piece of text from one script to another so that you can read it phonetically. Script Converter currently supports 17 languages: Bengali, English, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
So, try out these tools and
let us know
what you think.
Posted by New Melchizedec Sundararaj, Software Engineer
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