Google Translate Blog: February 2010

Google Translate Blog

The official source for news on Google's translation technologies

Integrating translation into Google Goggles

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Yesterday, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Eric Schmidt and I demonstrated a prototype version of Google Goggles that showcases the potential of integrating Google's machine translation and image recognition technologies. In the video below, you'll see how we use Goggles to take a picture of a German menu and instantly translate the text into English:

You may wonder what's happening in the background. On the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone's camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.
Right now this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it's not yet ready for prime time. However, it shows a lot of promise for what the future might hold. Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language. Eventually, we're hoping to build a version of Google Goggles that can translate between all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate — bringing even more information to you on the go.Posted by Hartmut Neven, Scientist

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Labels: Google Goggles , Mobile , Translate Blog

Welcome to the Google Translate Blog

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Welcome to our new blog for Google Translate. You're probably familiar with Google Translate, our free service that offers automatic machine translations between 52 languages — more than 2500 language pairs. In the last two years we've made many improvements to Translate, including the most recent additions of Haitian Creole and Persian , transliteration for reading and writing, and integration with Google Toolbar to read any website — just to name a few. There's always a lot happening related to Translate, so we've created this blog to share all of our new developments with the world.

When I joined the Google research team in 2004, we offered machine translation for fewer than 10 languages. By significantly increasing translation quality and coverage, we believed that Google Translate could be a valuable tool for breaking down language barriers that limit communication and access to information for many people. We therefore set out to build a new machine translation system leveraging Google's strengths: large data resources and the corresponding computational power to process it. To achieve this goal, we built advanced machine learning algorithms to translate content automatically based on an extensive corpus of translated texts.

In 2006 we launched Chinese and Arabic, the first languages based on this new technology. Since then we've continually improved quality and added more languages to reach our current total of 52 different languages — representing well over 95 percent of the Internet users. We're especially proud of our ability to serve very small language communities by offering Icelandic, Yiddish, Albanian, Catalan, Welsh and Haitian Creole translation.

Thanks to these advancements millions of people now use Google Translate and usage continues to grow significantly. People around the world can search the web in most languages and read websites, blogs and tweets regardless of the language they're written in. In short, we're beginning to see traditional language barriers break down. We believe that translation has the power not only to bring people together across cultures but also to facilitate progress and positive change.

Our mission is to make all information accessible to you, no matter what language you speak or what device or platform you use. Imagine having a phone conversation with a person half-way across the globe and being able to understand them — no matter what language they're speaking — as the conversation is translated in real-time. Our universal translator hasn't reached all the capabilities you know from Star Trek quite yet but we're definitely headed in that direction. Universally accessible and accurate translation is a lofty goal, but we're committed to it.

So once again, welcome to our blog. We hope you'll come back often for all the latest news on Google Translate.Posted by Franz Och, Principal Scientist