Google Translate Blog
The official source for news on Google's translation technologies
Translate more Indic languages with the updated Google Translate for iPhone app
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Back in June
, we launched five new experimental Indic languages for
Google Translate
on the desktop and mobile web app. Today, we’ve updated the
Google Translate for iPhone app
to add these new alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. This brings the total number of languages supported by the app to 63 languages.
The updated app supports the ability to view dictionary results for single words and to display romanizations for these new Indic languages. So even if you can't read the script the words are written in, you can still take a shot at reading the translation.
Since these are still experimental alpha languages, you can expect translations be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese—which have much more parallel data to power our statistical machine translation approach. Despite these challenges, we believe users will find these new languages helpful and we're excited to be making them available through the Translate app.
Google Translate for iPhone now supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them. Get the latest version of the
Google Translate for iPhone app
from the App Store now and start breaking down language barriers wherever you are!
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate
Breaking down language barriers with translated English-language results
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
(Cross-posted from the
Inside Search Blog
)
English speakers take it for granted that they can always find answers online, regardless of their search topic. But what if you speak Hindi, Welsh or Afrikaans? The amount of content available online per speaker for Hindi is just 1% of the vast content out there on the web per English speaker. So if you speak one of the languages with less online content, some of the most relevant results for your search may actually be in English.
To help break down that language barrier between you and the answers you need, starting today you may see relevant results in English in addition to those in your default language. For example, let’s say you speak Hindi and want to find information on mountain climbing -- we want to help you also find the relevant pages in English and for these, you’ll also see a translation into your language.
Language is one of the biggest barriers to making information universally accessible, and we’ve been working to
make increasing use of machine translation
to improve search across languages. This is especially important for languages with less prevalent local language content available online. You should also get the most relevant information regardless of the language you’re searching in. We use machine translation to translate your search, find the pages that best answer your question and translate the relevant results for you.
You’ll start to see relevant English-language pages when you’re searching in one of 14 languages: Afrikaans, Malay, Swahili, Serbian, Slovak, Macedonian, Slovenian, Norwegian, Hindi, Catalan, Maltese, Icelandic, Welsh and Albanian. If you click on the main result title, you’ll get to the original English-language page, while the translated link underneath will take you to a translated page. We hope this will help you find the information you need, no matter what language it’s in.
Posted by Jordan Gilliland, Software Engineer - Cross Language Search Team
Bringing relevant news to you, regardless of language -- translated news
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
To help bridge language barriers between you and the news of interest to you from around the world -- and to bring you more diverse perspectives on foreign events -- we’ve added a new “translate” button to the expandable story boxes in the U.S. English edition of
Google News
.
Clicking the translate button reveals the English translation of the original headline using
Google Translate
. Clicking on the headline takes you to the publisher’s website where you can choose to use Google Translate to see an English version of the entire article. Headlines are labeled with their country of origin.
To do this, we look for foreign articles from local sources on a relevant news topic. For example, in the case of the flood in Thailand, in addition to surfacing English articles from international press like New York Times, we might show a related article from a local source like อาร์วายที9.
At the same time, we hope readers will benefit from finding relevant news in other languages and being able to read it without knowing the language.
Posted by Yaroslav Kurovtsev, Software Engineer, Google Translate
Start the conversation with Google Translate for Android
Thursday, October 13, 2011
(Cross posted on the
Official Google Blog
and
Google Mobile Blog
)
Mobile technology and the web have made it easier for people around the world to access information and communicate with each other. But there’s still a daunting obstacle: the language barrier. We’re trying to knock down that barrier so everyone can communicate and connect more easily.
Earlier this year, we launched an
update
to Google Translate for Android with an experimental feature called Conversation Mode, which enables you to you translate speech back and forth between languages. We began with just English and Spanish, but today we’re expanding to 14 languages, adding Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.
To use Conversation Mode, speak into your phone’s microphone, and the Translate app will translate what you’ve said and read the translation out loud. The person you’re speaking with can then reply in their language, and Conversation Mode will translate what they said and read it back to you.
This technology is still in alpha, so factors like background noise and regional accents may affect accuracy. But since it depends on examples to learn, the quality will improve as people use it more. We wanted to get this early version out to help start the conversation no matter where you are in the world.
We’ve also added some other features to make it easier to speak and read as you translate. For example, if you wanted to say “Where is the train?” but Google Translate recognizes your speech as “Where is the rain?”, you can now correct the text before you translate it. You can also add unrecognized words to your personal dictionary.
When viewing written translation results, you can tap the magnifying glass icon to view the translated text in full screen mode so you can easily show it to someone nearby, or just pinch to zoom in for a close-up view.
Tap the magnifying glass icon to view translations full screen.
Finally, we’ve also optimized the app for larger screens like your Android tablet.
While we work to expand full Conversation Mode to even more languages, Google Translate for Android still supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them.
Download the Google Translate app in
Android Market
— it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 2.2 and up.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager
Google Translate for Google+
Monday, August 29, 2011
We've heard from a lot of
Google+
users wanting an easier way to understand posts written in other languages, so we thought we should do something about that.
We just
introduced
on Google+, a new Chrome extension,
Google Translate for Google+
, that uses the power of Google Translate to automatically translate any post or comment into more than 50 languages.
Once you've installed the extension, refresh Google+ and you'll see Translate links next to posts and comments. Click the links to instantly see translations.
You can get the extension from the Chrome Web Store here:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jfppgkomfopklagggkjiaddgndkgopgl
Note:
This extension is currently
experimental
as we figure out the best way to integrate translation into the Google+ community. So please give us your feedback in the comments, or by clicking the “Send Feedback” button on Google+.
Posted by Josh Estelle, Senior Software Engineer
Paid version of Google Translate API now open for business
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
(Cross-posted from the
Google Code Blog
)
Back in May, we
announced
the deprecation of the free
Translate API v1
. Today, we’re introducing a paid version of the Google Translate API for businesses and commercial software developers. The Google Translate API provides a programmatic interface to access Google’s latest machine translation technology. This API supports translations between 50+ languages (more than 2500 language pairs) and is made possible by Google’s cloud infrastructure and large scale machine learning algorithms.
The paid version of Translate API removes many of the usage restrictions of previous versions and can now be used in commercial products. Translation costs $20 per million (M) characters of text translated (or approximately $0.05/page, assuming 500 words/page). You can sign up online via the
APIs console
for usage up to 50 M chars/month.
Developers who created projects in the APIs Console and started using the
Translate API v2
prior to today will continue to receive a courtesy limit of 100K chars/day until December 1, 2011 or until they enable billing for their projects.
For academic users, we will continue to offer free access to the Google Translate Research API through our
University Research Program for Google Translate
. For website translations, we encourage you to use the
Google Website Translator gadget
which will continue to be free for use on all web sites. In addition,
Google Translate
,
Translator Toolkit,
the mobile translate apps for
iPhone
and
Android
, and translation features within
Chrome
,
Gmail
, etc. will continue to be available to all users at no charge.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager
Messages for Japan at Tanabata in Sendai
Monday, August 15, 2011
(Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
)
A month after this spring’s devastating earthquake in Japan, we
created a site
where people from around the world could submit messages of hope in their own languages and have them automatically translated into Japanese. From Paris to Dubai to Manila, nearly 30,000 messages have been posted through
messagesforjapan.com
.
This past weekend marked the celebration of
Tanabata
in Sendai, the largest city in the disaster area and home to one of the most famous festivals in the country. People often celebrate Tanabata, which means "Evening of the Seventh,” by writing wishes on tanzaku (small strips of paper) and hanging them on bamboo branches. This year, these paper strips displayed some of the messages of hope submitted through the site, and festival participants added their own messages to those from around the world.
We’ve updated messagesforjapan.com so you can
see photos
of people gathering for Tanabata in Sendai—reading, creating and hanging messages in the area surrounding the disaster earlier this year.
Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager
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