Google Translate Blog
The official source for news on Google's translation technologies
Giving a voice to more languages on Google Translate
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
One of the popular features of Google Translate is the ability to hear translations spoken out loud (”text-to-speech”) by clicking the speaker icon beside some translations, like the one below.
We rolled this feature out for English and Haitian Creole translations a few months ago and added French, Italian, German, Hindi and Spanish
a couple of weeks ago
. Now we’re bringing text-to-speech to even more languages with the open source speech synthesizer,
eSpeak
.
By integrating eSpeak we’re adding text-to-speech functionality for Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.
You may notice that the audio quality of these languages isn’t at the same level as the previously released languages. Clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect, but we will continue to improve the performance and number of languages that are supported.
So go ahead and give it a try! Click the on the speaker icon for any of these translations:
“airport” in Greek
,
“lightning” in Chinese
or
“smile” in Swahili
.
Posted by Fergus Henderson, Software Engineer
Translate the real world with Google Goggles
Monday, May 10, 2010
(This was posted on the
Google Mobile Blog
on 5/6/2010)
Traveling to another country can be an amazing experience. The opportunity to immerse yourself in a different culture can give you a new perspective. However, it can be hard to fully enjoy the experience if you do not understand the local language. For example, ordering food from a menu you can not read can be an adventure. Today we are introducing a new feature of
Google Goggles
that will prove useful to travelers and
monoglots
everywhere: Goggles translation.
Here’s how it works:
Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words
Press the shutter button
If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate
Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages
Google Goggles in action (click images to see large version)
The
first Goggles translation prototype
was unveiled earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and could only recognize German text. Today Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages. We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages. Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well.
Every new release of Google Goggles contains at least one new feature and a large number of improvements to our existing functionality. In addition to translation, Goggles v1.1 features improved barcode recognition, a larger corpus of artwork, recognition of many more products and logos, an improved user interface, and the ability to initiate visual searches using images in your phone’s photo gallery.
Computer vision is a hard problem. While we are excited about Goggles v1.1, we know that there are many images that we cannot yet recognize. The Google Goggles team is working on solving the technical challenges required to make computers see. We hope you are as excited as we are about the possibilities of visual search.
Google Goggles v1.1 is available on devices running Android 1.6 and higher. To download, please scan the QR code below or go to the Android Market app on your phone and search for “Google Goggles”. See our
help center
for more information.
Posted by Alessandro Bissacco, Software Engineer
100,000 language pairs and advanced features in Translator Toolkit
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Last week, we launched a variety of features on
Google Translator Toolkit
, Google’s easy-to-use translation aid.
100,000 language pairs.
Now you can translate from
345 source languages into 345 target languages
in Translator Toolkit. For example, you can translate from Welsh into Spanish or Māori into Chinese.
Open translation as a Google document.
When you’ve completed your translation, you can publish your translation into
Google Docs
. From Docs, you can invite other users to edit or view the translation, or you can publish your translation as a web page.
Spell check.
Translator Toolkit now supports spell check, so you can verify the spelling of your translations.
Colored segments.
To help you translate even faster, you can now customize your translation view so that, for example, machine-translated text is red, ‘high-fuzzy’ match (or near-perfect) translations are orange, and human translations are black. By customizing your view, you can quickly spot the text that needs the most work.
Translation statistics.
When you create a new translation, we now calculate translation scope, which shows the number of untranslated words, machine translated words, ‘high-fuzzy’ match words, and perfect translation memory words in your translation. Translation statistics can help you figure out how much work you’ll need to do to create the perfect translation even before you get started.
Split and merge segments.
Sometimes one sentence in one language translates to two sentences in another language. For example, the English sentence,
Jen is a huge Dalí fan and she wanted to hit both Figueras and Cadaqués, two must-sees on her itinerary.
translates into two sentences in Chinese:
简是一个超级的达利爱好者。
她想去Figueras和Cadaqués，两个她行程中的必经之地。
By splitting the segment, advanced users can improve leverage in their translation memories. Similarly, we also allow users to merge segments, so advanced users can rearrange sentences to create the perfect translation.
Check out these latest features in
Translator Toolkit
and
let us know
what you think.
Posted by Srinidhi Viswanatha, Software Engineer
Helping you read and write foreign scripts with Google Transliteration and Script Converter
Friday, April 23, 2010
For many Internet users, it is not always easy to write in languages that use unique character sets like Hindi, Hebrew and Arabic. Most computer keyboards only allow for the input of Roman characters (the alphabet used by most Western languages) and converting between scripts can be difficult. To make this process easier we launched an improved version of
Google Transliteration
at the end of last year, a service which enables you to phonetically convert Roman letters into a variety of other scripts.
Today we’re delighted to announce support for five new languages:
Amharic
,
Tigrinya
,
Hebrew
,
Oriya
and
Sinhalese
. This bring the total up to 22 languages spoken across Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. These new languages are currently available at
http://www.google.com/transliterate
.
Since you can’t use Google Transliteration offline we also launched the transliteration based
“Input Method Editor” (IME)
earlier this year. Once you
download and install
the Google Transliteration IME (don’t worry, it's free), you can type a word the way it sounds using Roman characters and the software will convert the word to its native script. For example, typing "hamesha" in Google Hindi IME transliterates into Hindi as: हमेशा.
As an improvement to the IME, we’ve recently added 5 more languages (Amharic, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian and Tigrinya) as well as
canonical schemes
,
macros
and support for Windows 64-bit. You can read about all these powerful new features on the
Google Transliteration IME help page
.
Now what if you come across a language that you can speak but can’t read? For example, if you can speak Hindi, you may know that “namaste” is a greeting, however you may not be able to read ‘नमस्ते’ in Hindi script. Our new
Script Converter
tool converts a given web page or piece of text from one script to another so that you can read it phonetically. Script Converter currently supports 17 languages: Bengali, English, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
So, try out these tools and
let us know
what you think.
Posted by New Melchizedec Sundararaj, Software Engineer
More love for our multilingual Toolbar users
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Last July
we enabled automatic page translations
in Google Toolbar and we’ve been thrilled by the positive response. Today, we’re taking another step to make automatic translation easier. Now, if Google Toolbar’s default language is set to one of our
supported languages
, you can use our new Word Translator feature to hover over a word with your mouse and get an automatic instant translation. If you want Toolbar to translate into a different language, you can change it in the Toolbar Options menu.
Entire page translations are great if you have little knowledge of a given language. However, if you’re a multi-lingual user who just needs certain words translated, hovering is a lot quicker than searching word-by-word on Google Translate.
Here is an example of the word “vitesse” (speed) translated from French to German:
The new Word Translator feature is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox. And if you use Google Chrome,
automatic page translation
is already built in, and we're working to build more Translate features.
We hope this helps you browse pages in non-native languages faster, regardless of your language proficiency.
Install the latest Toolbar
version and give it a try!
Posted by Dmitry Gozman, Software Engineer
Create your own Search Story!
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
If you live in the United States you probably saw our
Parisian Love ad
during the Super Bowl that famously highlighted Google Translate in the search results ("translate tu es très mignon"). Many users responded by making their own parody videos covering topics they felt passionate about.
We’re excited to say that today we
launched a tool
that allows any user to quickly and easily make their own Search Story video. You just have to put in the search queries you want and the tool does the rest! Check out this video that highlights translate in Google search:
As you can see, by typing “translate _______” into Google search you can see translations right on the search results page--as well as tell a pretty funny story. What sort of videos will you make?
Posted by Andrew Gomez, Associate Product Marketing Manager
More love for our foreign language learners
Monday, April 12, 2010
With Google Translate we are always iterating, adding new features and improving translation quality. Today we would like to highlight a few of the features we’ve added recently.
In November 2009 we
launched
a “text-to-speech” feature which allowed users to hear words and sentences in English read out loud by Google Translate. Since then we’ve added Haitian Creole and in March added French, Italian, and German to the list of supported languages. To hear any of languages out loud, just click the icon next to the translation when you visit
translate.google.com
.
In addition, we have recently doubled the number of languages that support transliterated input. Last year we
announced
that you could type transliterated Arabic, Hindi, and Persian. We have now extended that functionality to Greek, Russian and Serbian. With all of these languages you can type transliterated words in roman script and have the script converted automatically. Go ahead and
check it out
!
While we are on the topic of transliteration, the labs product
Google Transliteration
has recently added Hebrew, Oriya and Sinhalese to its supported languages. We expect to have Hebrew transliteration working in Google Translate soon as well.
Added on 4/14/10:
Hindi and Spanish "text-to-speech" are now live on Google Translate as well.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager
Labels
alpha languages
Android
api
BBC
Challenge
chrome
football
Google Goggles
Google Translate
Google Translate for Animals
I/O
integrations
Mobile
new languages
partnerships
Research
search
Search Stories
text-to-speech
toolbar
Translate Blog
Translate Community
translation quality
Translator Toolkit
transliteration
Wear
website translation element
Wikipedia
Youtube
Archive
2016
May
Apr
Feb
2015
Dec
Oct
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Oct
Jul
2013
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Nov
Oct
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2009
Dec
Nov
Feed
Follow @google
Follow
Useful Links
About Translate
Translate Community
Translate for Android
Translate for iOS
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Follow