Google Translate Blog

Google Translate learns to read Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

It's hard enough trying to figure out what something says in a foreign language, but with some languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, it can be trickier because you very well might not know how to enter those foreign characters into your device for Google Translate. We are making entering these characters easier than ever with the latest update to Google Translate for Android (versions 2.3 and up) by introducing camera-input support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Just tap the camera icon, snap a picture of the text, and brush your finger over the part you want translated.
It’s almost as if you could read Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all along.   Currently, the text you select with camera-input must be horizontal, but vertical-text support is on its way. Additionally, this update introduces handwriting-input support for Slovenian, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Lithuanian, Icelandic, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Welsh, Latvian, and Afrikaans. You might say Google Translate just got a lot handier in Europe and Southern Africa.  Posted by Minqi Jiang, Associate Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Translate team.

A Smarter Dictionary for Translation

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Mahatma Gandhi tells us that "Love is the strongest force the world possesses." Love comes in many forms, and each has different translations. Today, we are introducing three new features to Google Translate that help to distinguish among translations of a word, because no love should ever be lost in translation.

Reverse translations. Our users often tell us that they check our translations by translating them back into their original language. Reverse translations can distinguish translations of different meanings and reveal subtle differences among similar words. Each translation is now annotated with its most frequent reverse translations.

With reverse translations as a guide, you can pick from dozens of languages to tell your love that they are your darling (querido) and not just your hobby (afición).

Frequencies. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert was known to spend hours on end in pursuit of le mot juste—the perfect word. At Google, we prefer to deliver results in an instant, ranked in order of relevance. Frequency indicators now mark each translation as common, uncommon, or rare, based on the vast number of translations we use to train our system. The rarest translations are hidden by default, but appear easily with a click. Your search for the perfect translation should now be more efficient than ever.

Synonyms. Languages often contain different words that share a common meaning. Instead of one long list, our results now group synonymous translations together, so that you can quickly identify clusters of related words.

This feature is currently available only when translating into English, but we intend to support more languages soon.

We hope that these new features will help you explore the grand variety of words in the world's many languages. Consider this new, smarter dictionary for translation as one more way of saying “love” from all of us on the Google Translate team to you.

Posted by John DeNero, Research Scientist and Minqi Jiang, Associate Product Manager, Google Translate.

Build a global audience on YouTube by translating your captions

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

(Cross-posted from the Official YouTube Partners & Creators Blog)
Growing a global audience on YouTube means having your videos reach many people, speaking many languages. So today we’ve made it easier for you to translate YouTube video captions into more than 300 languages. See more details in the help center, or follow the step-by-step instructions below:
Getting started You’ll first need a caption track for your video, so if you don’t yet have one you can learn how to make one here. Select “Request translation” in the YouTube Video Manager, choose the languages you’d like to translate into, and click “Next.” We’ll create caption translation documents that you can now invite anyone to help translate, or you can translate yourself. To translate the captions yourself, select the language, and it’ll open up the caption translation document in the Google Translator Toolkit editor to help your translate faster.

Watch while you translate
To give you context on the captions, we’ve also embedded the YouTube video in the editor so you can watch as you translate. For several languages we’ll provide first draft of the translation using Google’s machine translation technology. We’ll also provide preview of what the translated caption looks like on the video so you can make sure the translated captions fit.

Publish and enjoy
Click “Publish to YouTube” when you’re finished, and we’ll publish the translated caption back to your YouTube video. If you’re not the video owner, we’ll notify the owner via email that there’s a pending translation waiting to be approved and published.
By providing translated captions, you’ll not only make your video globally accessible but also improve discoverability in other languages. Now you can increase your audience by reaching more people around the world.
Posted by Jeff Chin and Brad Ellis, product managers, who recently watched “Life in a Day” which is subtitled in 26 languages.

Translating Lao

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Today, we are adding Lao to Google Translate, making it our 65th supported language. We are excited to bring Lao content to users around the world, and to help Lao speakers access more of the world's web content in other languages.

The Google Translate team is constantly working to improve automatic translations, both for languages that have been available for some time, and for currently unavailable languages whose translation quality have yet to meet our launch standards. This work includes collecting new data from which our system can learn and grow smarter; changing the algorithms behind Google Translate; and improving the grammaticality of translations. There are many languages we work on that are not there yet but that we hope to launch in the future.

Support for Lao meets our launch standards, but translation quality is at the lower end compared to that of other languages we offer. We therefore designate Lao with an “alpha” status until we can make further improvements. While our Lao translations will be usable in some situations, like providing an English reader with the gist of an article written in Lao, they will fail in other situations where more precise translations are needed. We need your feedback in order to improve the quality of Lao translations.

There are two ways in which you can directly help us improve the quality of Lao translation, or that of any other language:

Provide alternate translations by clicking on words or phrases of the translated sentence like in the example below:

Use the Google Translator Toolkit to upload translations.

Your feedback is always greatly appreciated.
ຂອບໃຈຫຼາຍໆເດີ້ (Thank you very much).

Posted by Thorsten Brants - Research Scientist, Google Translate

Point, tap, brush and listen

Thursday, August 9, 2012

With our latest update to our Google Translate app for Android, we’re aiming to get one step closer to the Babel fish. By integrating Google Goggles’ optical character recognition (OCR) technology, we’ve made it possible for you to use the camera of your Android smartphone to input text without typing. This makes Google Translate for Android one of our most intelligent and machine learning-intensive apps. Speech recognition, handwriting recognition, OCR, and machine translation all rely on powerful statistical models built on billions of samples of data. Here’s how it comes together:

To use our new camera feature, push the camera button, point at some text, tap to freeze the picture, brush the part you want with your finger, et voila -- enjoy your machine translation. As usual, you can click the text-to-speech icons to listen to the source text or the translated text. We currently support optical character recognition for Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, and we’re also working hard to get more languages on the list.

Now give it a try -- translate your favorite tapas menu items quicker when you’re visiting Barcelona, decipher those mysterious Australian roadsigns, and finally learn how to pronounce the name of your favorite Russian movie. Leave us a comment on Google Play to tell us what you think.
Posted by Etienne Deguine - Associate Product Manager for Google Translate

Observing words in their natural habitat - example sentences in Google Translate

Friday, July 13, 2012

Did you know that more than 5000 new words are created each year? At Google we’re always curious about new words from around the world, from all languages, and we think one of the best ways to understand and make sense of new words is by observing them in their natural habitat. Our latest feature does just that by providing you with example sentences taken from fresh new stories around the web.

To try out the feature, simply type a few words in the left-hand text box of Google Translate, and then click on the example sentence icon:

Along with alternate translations (a feature that lets you click on a word to see different translations), and our dictionary results (literal translations extracted from our dictionaries), we hope that being able to look at example sentences will make machine translation more useful for you -- and a little more educational. Stay tuned as we continue to improve and enrich our corpus of example sentences.
Posted by Etienne Deguine, Associate Product Manager, Google Translate