Google Translate Blog
The official source for news on Google's translation technologies
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
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