Google Translate Blog
The official source for news on Google's translation technologies
Grunt, Woof and Moo to you too
Thursday, April 1, 2010
For millennia man and animal have tolerantly coexisted, separated by language and the development of opposable thumbs. Today we can proudly say that we have overcome one of those hurdles. Presenting
Google Translate for Animals
, a new application available in Android Market.
This application allows you to record animals sounds and have the sounds analyzed and translated into English by Google Translate. With animal translation you can now finally understand why Spot keeps peeing in your closet or why Pickles keeps leaving dead mice in the tub. No longer must humanity struggle to comprehend when Lassie warns, “Hurry, Timmy’s fallen down the well!”
The technology isn’t perfect yet, so you may discover some translations that don’t make perfect sense. The algorithms are always improving however, thanks to the large corpus of cute cat videos that have been uploaded to YouTube.
We think that this is an exciting step in understanding and communicating with the world around us. Stay tuned for the addition of “old car” and “stomach” to the translation capabilities of the application this summer.
Posted by Woof Woofington, Product Barketing Manager via Google Translate for Animals
An experiment in cross-language communication with the BBC
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Earlier this month BBC
launched an experiment
using Google Translate to faciliate real-time discussion across languages. The project was part of the BBC’s
SuperPower series
which explored the transformative power of the internet. On SuperPower Nation Day, BBC readers from around the world were invited to discuss the Nation Day event online--and have their comments translated live for others to read.
The initiative used Google Translate to translate comments between seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, Persian, Indonesian, Portugese, and Spanish. While the translations were not perfect, most users were surprised by how well Google Translate enabled people from around the world to communicate with one another.
“Acredito que isto pode dar certo!” wrote Nathana from Brazil in one of the comments--or, as translated by Google Translate, “I believe this can work!”
While a few of the translations looked strange at first glance, most users found them intelligible and useful. For example one user’s comment was translated from Persian into, “World, the village is small. We all need each other to help maintain the world.” As you can see, not perfect, but understandable.
This experiment is a good example of how Google Translate can be used to help people of different languages communicate with one another. While there is still a long way to go in improving Google’s translation technology, we hope and expect to see projects like the BBC’s SuperPower Nation Day become more and more common--and as the opportunities arise we look forward to making our contribution with Google Translate.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager
Translating Youtube with auto-captioning
Monday, March 22, 2010
We recently mentioned on the
official Youtube blog
that we were enabling auto-captioning for all Youtube videos. This new technology takes advantage of Google’s speech-to-text algorithms to add captions to videos with spoken English content. Captions have clear benefits for the hearing impaired, but there is another benefit which is worth noting: translation.
As you know, Google Translate can already translate between any of our 52 supported languages, whether the text is a word, paragraph or website. With this new advancement in Youtube’s technology we can now add “captions” to that list as well.
Currently Youtube’s auto-captioning technology can only transcribe spoken English but, thanks to Google Translate, these English captions can be translated for non-English speakers as well. Check out the caption and translation technology in this video of
Barack Obama speaking to students
or
author Elizabeth Gilbert speaking at TED
. Hover over the “caption” icon and select “Translate Captions” to activate the translations.
Both the auto-captioning and translation technologies are generated by machines, so there are still plenty of situations where mistakes will occur. Furthermore, when these technologies work together, mistakes can be amplified so you may find some captions that don’t make much sense. We know there is a lot of room to improve both technologies, but we feel that offering this translation feature is an important step in making information on Youtube more accessible.
In the next few months we expect over 150,000 Youtube channels to implement auto-captioning with translation. This is just the beginning and we hope that all Youtube content will soon be enjoyed by all Youtube users, regardless of what language they speak.
Posted by Andrew Gomez, Associate Product Marketing Manager
A faster, simpler, and safer browser goes polyglot
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
If you're excited about the latest in integrating translation tools into your web experience, today's
new stable release
of
Google Chrome
brings to our users translation capabilities in the web browser. Here's quick demo on how the translation feature works in Chrome:
When the language of the webpage you're viewing is different from your
preferred language setting
, Chrome will display an infobar asking if you'd like the page to be translated for you, using
Google Translate
. With just a click, the entire text on the page will be translated into your language of preference, without the need for browser extensions or plugins. If you don't want Chrome to offer to translate a particular language or web page, you can control these settings by clicking on the "Options" button in the infobar.
So how does the browser actually 'know' what language the page is in? Language detection takes place locally on your computer, so no information is sent to Google Translate until you choose to translate a page. Language detection in Chrome is based on the compact language detection library (CLD), which we've made available as
open source code
.
For those of you who are interested in the technical nitty-gritty, here's what takes place under the hood: for most languages, the CLD determines the language of a page by breaking down its text in quadgrams, or sequences of up to four characters. The CLD then looks up each quadgram in a large hashtable that contains language probabilities, which is included in the Chrome binaries. This hashtable was originally built by processing language probabilities over billions of web pages that are indexed by Google's search engine. In just a few milliseconds, the CLD can accurately determine the language of most web pages. Chrome shows an infobar offering to translate the page only when the CLD has detected the language of a web page above a certain degree of confidence. If you click the "Translate" button in the infobar, the text contained in the page is then sent to Google Translate's servers (over a secure connection if the page was served over HTTPS). Thanks to the work of the Google Translate team, Google Translate's servers return this translated text quickly so that Chrome can replace the text in the page with the translated version. Rest assured, the request to Google Translate's servers does not include any cookies.
We're excited to introduce translation in the browser, and look forward to improving this feature over future releases of Chrome. For example, we hope to work on include making language detection even more precise -- by providing larger CLD tables without increasing the size of the browser's installation package, and improving the way Chrome interacts with other website translation tools.
With this new stable release of Chrome, you can easily read a diversity of foreign language information sources, access educational materials from universities around the world, and even conduct online commerce across borders and languages -- all in your native language. We hope that the browser can truly be a passport to a web that is remarkably local as it is global. You can try translation in the browser for yourself by downloading Google Chrome at
google.com/chrome
. For those of you who aren't yet acquainted with Chrome, you can
learn more
about Chrome's
speed
,
security
, and many other
features
.
Posted by Jay Civelli, Software Engineer, Google Chrome
Custom search and data liberation in Translator Toolkit
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Yesterday, we released some cool, new features in
Google Translator Toolkit
. Google Translator Toolkit is a language translation service for professional and amateur translators that builds on
Google Translate
and makes translation
faster and easier
.
Custom search, which enables you to search for terms in your
translation memories
and
glossaries
,
Translation memory download, which enables advanced users to download their translation memories in
TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) format
,
Glossary download, which enables you to download your glossaries as
CSV (comma-separated value) files
.
For example, if you’re translating “drive” into Spanish, a custom search finds the translations “Ordanor flash” for “Flash drive” and “canon viajes en coche” for “self-drive canyon tours”, so you can pick just the right word for your translation context.
To clarify where the translations come from, we’ve added the name of the translation memory next to the translation search results – whether it’s our global, shared translation memory, another user’s shared translation memory (if that TM is public, or shared with you), or your own translations.
We’ve also made some changes to make it even easier to use the translation editor: we’ve made the toolkit resizable, and we’ve rearranged the toolkit in
two tabs
– one tab for custom search and another tab for automated search for the current segment.
But that’s not all. At Google, we believe our users should control the data they store in our products. In keeping with this spirit of
data liberation
, Translator Toolkit now allows you to download your translation memories and glossaries in simple, standard formats.
So check out these latest improvements and let us know
what you think.
Posted by Siddaarth Shanmugam and Vijay Thadkal, Software Engineers, Translator Toolkit
Integrating translation into Google Goggles
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Yesterday, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Eric Schmidt and I demonstrated a prototype version of
Google Goggles
that showcases the potential of integrating Google's machine translation and image recognition technologies. In the video below, you'll see how we use Goggles to take a picture of a German menu and instantly translate the text into English:
You may wonder what's happening in the background. On the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone's camera to an
optical character recognition
(OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.
Right now this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it's not yet ready for prime time. However, it shows a lot of promise for what the future might hold. Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language. Eventually, we're hoping to build a version of Google Goggles that can translate between all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate — bringing even more information to you on the go.
Posted by Hartmut Neven, Scientist
Welcome to the Google Translate Blog
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Welcome to our new blog for Google Translate. You're probably familiar with Google Translate, our free service that offers automatic machine translations between 52 languages — more than 2500 language pairs. In the last two years we've made many improvements to Translate, including the most recent additions of
Haitian Creole
and
Persian
,
transliteration for reading and writing
, and integration with
Google Toolbar
to read any website — just to name a few. There's always a lot happening related to Translate, so we've created this blog to share all of our new developments with the world.
When I joined the Google research team in 2004, we offered machine translation for fewer than 10 languages. By significantly increasing translation quality and coverage, we believed that Google Translate could be a valuable tool for breaking down language barriers that limit communication and access to information for many people. We therefore set out to build a new machine translation system leveraging Google's strengths: large data resources and the corresponding computational power to process it. To achieve this goal, we built advanced machine learning algorithms to translate content automatically based on an extensive corpus of translated texts.
In 2006 we launched Chinese and Arabic, the first languages based on this new technology. Since then we've continually improved quality and added more languages to reach our current total of 52 different languages — representing well over 95 percent of the Internet users. We're especially proud of our ability to serve very small language communities by offering Icelandic, Yiddish, Albanian, Catalan, Welsh and Haitian Creole translation.
Thanks to these advancements millions of people now use Google Translate and usage continues to grow significantly. People around the world can search the web in most languages and read websites, blogs and tweets regardless of the language they're written in. In short, we're beginning to see traditional language barriers break down. We believe that translation has the power not only to bring people together across cultures but also to facilitate progress and positive change.
Our mission is to make all information accessible to you, no matter what language you speak or what device or platform you use. Imagine having a phone conversation with a person half-way across the globe and being able to understand them — no matter what language they're speaking — as the conversation is translated in real-time. Our universal translator hasn't reached all the capabilities you know from Star Trek quite yet but we're definitely headed in that direction. Universally accessible and accurate translation is a lofty goal, but we're committed to it.
So once again, welcome to our blog. We hope you'll come back often for all the latest news on Google Translate.
Posted by Franz Och, Principal Scientist
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