Google Translate Blog: February 2013

Google Translate Blog

The official source for news on Google's translation technologies

Get your YouTube video captions professionally translated into 36 languages

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

(Cross-posted from the Official YouTube Partners & Creators Blog)
Back in September, we launched a feature that made it easier to make your YouTube video accessible in more than 300 languages and help grow your audience globally, by translating the video’s captions yourself or inviting friends or people you know to help translate. Now you can connect directly with translation vendors and pay to get your captions translated quickly and professionally.
When you request a translation for your captions in YouTube, we’ll display a list of vendors along with their estimated pricing and delivery date so you can easily compare. We’ve initially collaborated with two companies, Gengo and Translated.net, to make their services available to you and to streamline the ordering process.

Just click “Start order” next to the vendor you’d like to use. This will then create an order and direct you to the vendor’s website to complete payment. When the translator completes the translation, they’ll send the translated caption directly back to YouTube. Once you approve, the translated caption will now be available for all your viewers!
Need to add a caption track to your video?
Before you can translate your video, you’ll first need a caption track for your video. One of the easiest and quickest way to create a caption track is to create or upload a transcript of your video. YouTube will then automatically sync your transcript with the video and create the time codes to generate the caption track. For more info, watch this video or take a look at this helpful guide.

Don’t know which languages to translate your video into?
If your video has already been published, let YouTube Analytics help. YouTube Analytics can show you the top geographies viewing your video, so you can choose the languages spoken in these countries. Learn more about YouTube Analytics here.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, who recently watched the “H+” digital series which has been captioned and subtitled into Spanish.

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Labels: Translate Blog

Introducing Our New Input Tools

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Considering the vast number of ways that users type in our 65 supported languages, we are pleased to announce the integration of Google’s new input tools in Google Translate. We have always allowed you to choose among alternative input methods, but your choice was limited. For example, only one of four popular input methods for Chinese was previously available. Our new input tools greatly expand the set of available input methods for many languages.

A Cyrllic letter-printing telegraph keyboard
We believe that your choice of input tools is important, because the best way to input text with a keyboard varies from language to language, and even from person to person. Every language has its own set of popular input methods, each familiar to its own subset of users. For example, the Portuguese keyboard has two common layouts, one popular in Brazil and another in Portugal. In addition, given the popularity of Latin-alphabet keyboards, a transliteration input tool is often the preferred input method for many languages, allowing users to convert Latin-alphabet input into the proper written script. (Chinese has over 80,000 characters. Try fitting them all on a keyboard.) With the right transliteration input tools turned on, you can simply type “privet” to input привет, “tieng chao” for tiếng chào, and “nihao” for 你好.

It’s easy to start using our new input tools. Once you have chosen your input language, you will see the input tools icon at the bottom of the text area. Click the icon to turn on the input tool or switch to another input tool in the drop-down menu.

The new input tools are now also available in other Google products, including Gmail, Drive, Chrome, and Android, as well as in Windows. We hope our new input tools will make your translation experience easier than ever!

- The Google Translate Team