Google Translate Blog: December 2010

Listen to us now!

Thursday, December 16, 2010

One of the features of Google Translate that users enjoy the most is the ability to listen to the text they have just translated in audio form. To play an audio version of the translated text we use a speech synthesizer, a computer algorithm that converts text to speech. Today, we have launched new speech synthesizer voices.
The new voices are available in three new languages — Arabic, Japanese, and Korean — and provide dramatic quality improvements for 17 other languages: Czech, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

So go ahead. Visit Google Translate and try a sentence or two. We hope you like our new voices. And for the beatboxing fans who used our old German voice: give it a try — it may still work... Have fun!

Posted by Alex Salcianu, Software Engineer

When one translation just isn’t enough

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

When you come to Google Translate, we always do our best to give you the most accurate translation our system can produce. However, sometimes translation can be pretty tough. Language is full of ambiguities and our system has to do its best to make the right choices. So why choose?
We’ve launched a new feature to provide you with alternate translations for each phrase in the translated text. Just click the translated phrase and you’ll see a pop-up menu of possible alternates for that phrase, as well as the original phrase highlighted in your original text. Not only can these alternative translations give you a better understanding of a confusing translation, but they also allow you to help Google choose the best alternative when we make a mistake.

This new feature is powered by harnessing the vast knowledge within our statistical machine translation system. Typically, when we produce a translation, our system searches through millions of possible translations, selecting the best -- that is, the most statistically likely -- translation. With this feature, we expose more of those possible alternatives. For more information about how our system works, check out http://translate.google.com/about/.
By using this feature, you can help improve Google Translate. Selecting phrase-level alternatives gives us feedback that fits well within the our system’s statistical models. We hope to incorporate this structured feedback into our system, improving translation quality over time.
We hope this makes our translations even more useful to you, and allows you to help us help you find the best translation possible!
Posted by Josh Estelle, Senior Software Engineer

On-screen Keyboards on Google Translate

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Today Google Translate supports translation between almost sixty languages, but typing many of those on a standard QWERTY keyboard ranges from difficult to impossible. That’s why today we’re happy to announce the addition of on-screen keyboards to Google Translate. Whether you’re a native Georgian (ქართული ენა) speaker travelling abroad, or a student learning German with no way to type those tricky umlauts (ü), we hope this new feature will come to your rescue.

You’ll notice a small keyboard icon in the bottom corner of the text input box. Click this to open a virtual keyboard for the selected input language. You can either click the letters on the on-screen keyboard, or type using your real keyboard while the on-screen keyboard is visible.

Some languages such as Vietnamese and Armenian have more than one popular layout for local keyboards. Our on-screen keyboards support multiple layouts too, and you can switch between these layouts by clicking on the arrows at the top of the on-screen keyboard

To close the on-screen keyboard, simple click the small keyboard icon again.

With this launch, we’ve added on-screen keyboards for these languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish.

Some of you may be familiar with our “Phonetic typing” feature - for a few languages such as Arabic, you can type a word as it would sound in English (e.g. “marhaban”), and see the letters transformed to Arabic (e.g. مرحبا) before being translated. The new on-screen keyboards do not interfere with phonetic typing for languages that support both – when the keyboard is open, phonetic typing will be disabled.

We hope that this latest addition to Google Translate will make writing and communicating in foreign languages even easier. Please let us know if you have any feedback in our discussion group.

Posted by Frank Yung-Fong Tang, Senior Software Engineer

Going Global with Google

Monday, December 6, 2010

(Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog)
AdWords started with the idea of connecting you with customers searching for your goods and services - wherever those customers may be. Today, we're announcing the launch of Google Global Market Finder, a free online tool that helps you find new markets overseas, and Google Ads for Global Advertisers, a new website that brings together Global Market Finder, AdWords, Google Translate, and other tools that can help you find, engage with, and support your customers worldwide - whether those customers are consumers or businesses searching for suppliers online.

Global Market Finder helps you answer the question: who are my potential customers overseas?

click for full size imageGoogle Ads for Global Advertisers

click for full size image

Find the right market for your products and services, by using tools such as the Global Market Finder

Translate your websites and ad text using Google Translate Web Element and Google Translator Toolkit

Reach new customers with relevant online ads

Understand options for international payment, shipping, and customer service

mosaic companybespoke shoe retailertech support companybed and breakfastPosted by Michael Galvez and Srinidhi Viswanatha, Global Advertisers team

Welcome, Google Apps users!

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Google Apps recently launched an improvement that made dozens of exciting Google services available to Google Apps users for the first time. As part of this launch, Google Translator Toolkit is now available to our Google Apps users for free with their Apps accounts.

Google Apps is Google’s suite of cloud-based messaging and collaboration apps used by over 30 million users in small businesses, large enterprises, educational institutions, government agencies and non-profit organizations around the world. If your organization hasn’t gone Google yet you can learn more about how to lower IT costs and improve productivity and collaboration with Google Apps.

For those users who have a Google Apps account, if your administrator has already transitioned your organization to the new infrastructure, you can now use Translator Toolkit by signing in at translate.google.com/toolkit with your existing Apps account.

For more details, read the complete post on the Google Enterprise blog and follow all the updates on other newly-available services for Google Apps users.

Posted by Jeremiah Dillon, Product Marketing Manager