Google Translate Blog
The official source for news on Google's translation technologies
Google Translate welcomes you to the Indic web
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
(Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
and on the
Research Blog
)
Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with
Google Translate
, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. In India and Bangladesh alone, more than 500 million people speak these five languages. Since 2009, we’ve launched a total of 11 alpha languages, bringing the current number of languages supported by Google Translate to 63.
Indic languages
differ from English in many ways, presenting several exciting challenges when developing their respective translation systems. Indian languages often use the
Subject Object Verb (SOV) ordering
to form sentences, unlike English, which uses
Subject Verb Object (SVO) ordering
. This difference in sentence structure makes it harder to produce fluent translations; the more words that need to be reordered, the more chance there is to make mistakes when moving them. Tamil, Telugu and Kannada are also highly
agglutinative
, meaning a single word often includes affixes that represent additional meaning, like tense or number. Fortunately, our research to improve Japanese (an SOV language) translation helped us with the word order challenge, while our work translating languages like German, Turkish and Russian provided insight into the agglutination problem.
You can expect translations for these new alpha languages to be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese—which have much more of the web content that powers our
statistical machine translation approach
. Despite these challenges, we release alpha languages when we believe that they help people better access the multilingual web. If you notice incorrect or missing translations for any of our languages, please
correct us
; we enjoy learning from our mistakes and your feedback helps us graduate new languages from alpha status. If you’re a translator, you’ll also be able to take advantage of our machine translated output when using the
Google Translator Toolkit
.
Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we’ve enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards. For example, if you type in the word “nandri,” it will generate the Tamil word நன்றி (
see what it means
). To see all these beautiful scripts in action, you’ll need to install fonts* for each language.
We hope that the launch of these new alpha languages will help you better understand the Indic web and encourage the publication of new content in Indic languages, taking us five alpha steps closer to a web without language barriers.
*Download the fonts for each language:
Tamil
,
Telugu
,
Bengali
,
Gujarati
and
Kannada
.
Posted by Ashish Venugopal, Research Scientist
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
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