Google Translate Blog: September 2012

Google Translate Blog

The official source for news on Google's translation technologies

Build a global audience on YouTube by translating your captions

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

(Cross-posted from the Official YouTube Partners & Creators Blog)
Growing a global audience on YouTube means having your videos reach many people, speaking many languages. So today we’ve made it easier for you to translate YouTube video captions into more than 300 languages. See more details in the help center, or follow the step-by-step instructions below:
Getting started You’ll first need a caption track for your video, so if you don’t yet have one you can learn how to make one here. Select “Request translation” in the YouTube Video Manager, choose the languages you’d like to translate into, and click “Next.” We’ll create caption translation documents that you can now invite anyone to help translate, or you can translate yourself. To translate the captions yourself, select the language, and it’ll open up the caption translation document in the Google Translator Toolkit editor to help your translate faster.

Watch while you translate
To give you context on the captions, we’ve also embedded the YouTube video in the editor so you can watch as you translate. For several languages we’ll provide first draft of the translation using Google’s machine translation technology. We’ll also provide preview of what the translated caption looks like on the video so you can make sure the translated captions fit.

Publish and enjoy
Click “Publish to YouTube” when you’re finished, and we’ll publish the translated caption back to your YouTube video. If you’re not the video owner, we’ll notify the owner via email that there’s a pending translation waiting to be approved and published.
By providing translated captions, you’ll not only make your video globally accessible but also improve discoverability in other languages. Now you can increase your audience by reaching more people around the world.
Posted by Jeff Chin and Brad Ellis, product managers, who recently watched “Life in a Day” which is subtitled in 26 languages.

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Labels: Translate Blog

Translating Lao

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Today, we are adding Lao to Google Translate, making it our 65th supported language. We are excited to bring Lao content to users around the world, and to help Lao speakers access more of the world's web content in other languages.

The Google Translate team is constantly working to improve automatic translations, both for languages that have been available for some time, and for currently unavailable languages whose translation quality have yet to meet our launch standards. This work includes collecting new data from which our system can learn and grow smarter; changing the algorithms behind Google Translate; and improving the grammaticality of translations. There are many languages we work on that are not there yet but that we hope to launch in the future.

Support for Lao meets our launch standards, but translation quality is at the lower end compared to that of other languages we offer. We therefore designate Lao with an “alpha” status until we can make further improvements. While our Lao translations will be usable in some situations, like providing an English reader with the gist of an article written in Lao, they will fail in other situations where more precise translations are needed. We need your feedback in order to improve the quality of Lao translations.

There are two ways in which you can directly help us improve the quality of Lao translation, or that of any other language:

Provide alternate translations by clicking on words or phrases of the translated sentence like in the example below:

Use the Google Translator Toolkit to upload translations.

Your feedback is always greatly appreciated.
ຂອບໃຈຫຼາຍໆເດີ້ (Thank you very much).

Posted by Thorsten Brants - Research Scientist, Google Translate