Google Translate Blog
The official source for news on Google's translation technologies
Share your story with the new Google Translate
Monday, August 30, 2010
Today, you may have noticed a brighter looking
Google Translate
. We’re currently rolling out several changes globally to our look and feel that should make translating text, webpages and documents on Google Translate even easier. These changes will be available globally within a couple of days.
Google Translate’s shiny new coat of paint
With today’s functional and visual changes we wanted to make it simpler for you to discover and make the most of Google Translate’s many features and integrations. For example, did you know that you can
search across languages on Google
using Google Translate? Or that you can
translate incoming email
in Gmail or take Google Translate with you on your phone? We’ve added all these tips on the new
Do more with Google Translate
page. You can also see some of these tips rotating on the new homepage.
We’ve also created an Inside Google Translate page, where you can learn how we create our translations. Is it the work of magic elves or learned linguists? Here Anton Andryeyev, an engineer on our team, gives you the inside scoop:
It’s always inspiring for us to learn how Google Translate enables people to break down communication barriers around the world. Lisa J. recently shared with us how she uses Google Translate to stay in touch with her grandparents. “I moved to the U.S. from China when I was six,” Lisa told us, “so I speak both English and Chinese fluently but I’m not very good at reading the complex Chinese alphabet.” When she gets an email from her grandparents in China, Google Translate helps her understand the sentences she can’t quite read. She also uses Google Translate when she’s writing her response. “I use Google Translate to make sure I’m using the right character in the right place,” she explained.
Do you use Google Translate to stay in touch with distant relatives? Read foreign news? Or make the most of your vacation? We’d love to hear from you, and invite you to
share your story
with us. Who knows, we might feature your story on the Google Translate blog!
UPDATED 9/3:
Thank you for your helpful feedback in the comments. Please add your feedback in our
Google Translate Help Forum
for us to easily track and respond to. Thank you!
Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager
Translate faster with keyboard shortcuts in Translator Toolkit
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Speed is an important part of translation, whether you’re a professional rushing to meet a client deadline or a volunteer looking to spend less time on a mouse and more on your keyboard. Last month, we added a
dozen new shortcuts
to
Translator Toolkit
, so you can spend less time taking your hands off your keyboard to use the mouse.
Translator Toolkit’s
18 keyboard shortcuts
help you quickly navigate through your translation or call up standard edit functions. For example, you can use
Ctrl+F
to start Find and Replace or
Ctrl+Home
to jump to the beginning of the document.
Use
Ctrl+F
to start Find and Replace
We’ve also added shortcuts for advanced users, including automatically replacing segments with source (
Ctrl+Shift+S
), machine translation (
Ctrl+Shift+M
), or translation memory matches (
Ctrl+Shift+L
). You can also use
Ctrl+Shift+C
to start concordance search or
Ctrl+Shift+I
to automatically insert placeholders.
Use
Ctrl+Shift+C
to start concordance
Check out these improvements now in
Translator Toolkit
. We'd love to hear
what you think
.
Posted by Sunil Chandra, Engineer
Translating Wikipedia
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
We believe that translation is key to our mission of making information useful to everyone. For example,
Wikipedia
is a phenomenal source of knowledge, especially for speakers of common languages such as English, German and French where there are hundreds of thousands—or millions—of articles available. For many smaller languages, however, Wikipedia doesn’t yet have anywhere near the same amount of content available.
To help Wikipedia become more helpful to speakers of smaller languages, we’re working with volunteers, translators and Wikipedians across India, the Middle East and Africa to translate more than 16 million words for Wikipedia into Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu. We began these efforts in 2008, starting with translating Wikipedia articles into Hindi, a language spoken by tens of millions of Internet users. At that time the
Hindi Wikipedia
had only 3.4 million words across 21,000 articles––while in contrast, the English Wikipedia had 1.3 billion words across 2.5 million articles.
We selected the Wikipedia articles using a couple of different sets of criteria. First, we used Google search data to determine the most popular English Wikipedia articles read in India. Using
Google Trends
, we found the articles that were consistently read over time––and not just temporarily popular. Finally we used
Translator Toolkit
to translate articles that either did not exist or were placeholder articles or “
stubs
” in Hindi Wikipedia. In three months, we used a combination of human and machine translation tools to translate 600,000 words from more than 100 articles in English Wikipedia, growing Hindi Wikipedia by almost 20 percent. We’ve since repeated this process for other languages, to bring our total number of words translated to 16 million.
We’re off to a good start but, as you can see in the graph below, we have a lot more work to do to bring the information in Wikipedia to people worldwide:
Number of non-stub Wikipedia articles by Internet users, normalized (English = 1)
We’ve also found that there are many Internet users who have used our tools to translate more than 100 million words of Wikipedia content into various languages worldwide. If you do speak another language we hope you’ll join us in bringing Wikipedia content to other languages and cultures with
Translator Toolkit
.
We
presented these results
last Saturday, July 10, at Wikimania 2010 in Gdańsk, Poland. We look forward to continuing to support the creation of the world’s largest encyclopedia and we can’t wait to work with Wikipedians and volunteers to create more content worldwide.
Posted by Michael Galvez, Product Manager
The Polish Ministry of Economy goes multi-lingual with Google Translate
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Google Translate team is always thinking about how to make information accessible to all internet users, not matter what language it is written in. Often people come across webpages in foreign languages, but don’t know that they can go to
Google Translate
to find out what the page says. This problem is especially challenging for government institutions that have wide audiences and information that needs to be translated into multiple languages. The
Polish Ministry of Economy
recently solved this problem by using our
website translation element
to make their
webpage
multilingual for visitors who don’t speak Polish.
By embedding the
website translation element
, the Ministry enabled visitors to translate site text instantly without leaving the Ministry’s webpage. With the addition of the Google Translate drop-down box, their webpages are now accessible to Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish speakers who don’t have any knowledge of Polish at all!
While the translation quality is not perfect, it is good enough to allow visitors who don’t speak Polish to interact in a way they never could have before. Check out the Ministry’s site or add the
website translation element
to your own webpage!
Posted by Andrew Gomez, Associate Product Marketing Manager
Goal! Gol! гол! Hadaf! - Football fans around the globe break down language barriers
Friday, June 11, 2010
Football is one of the truly global languages. Throughout the decades, fans have cheered, argued and shared tears as their teams have swept to victory with a wonder-goal in extra-time, or crumbled under the pressure of a penalty shootout. While emotions etched onto the faces of spectators are all too easy to read, verbally communicating across languages can be difficult. The BBC World Service now offers a way to break down these language barriers through
World Cup Team Talk
, which uses Google’s machine translation technology.
Back in March, the BBC World Service
launched an experiment
using Google Translate to explore the transformative power of the Internet and facilitate real-time discussion across languages. On
SuperPower Nation Day
, BBC World Service readers from around the world were invited to discuss the Nation Day event online—and have their comments translated live for others to read.
Although translations were not always perfect, people found the project useful and engaging—and its success inspired the BBC World Service to run another campaign to allow football fans from across the globe to join in conversation around the
beautiful game
.
Starting on June 11, football fans across the world will be able to contribute to a global conversation in 11 languages—Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, English, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Vietnamese and Welsh—and receive replies from fellow fans that are automatically translated back into their native language by Google Translate. The posts will also appear on an interactive map so people can see where in the world the contributions are coming from.
On the other side of the pond,
the Boston Globe
has
integrated Google Translate
into each article on its
Corner Kicks
soccer blog to extend the site’s reach across a multi-lingual readership, locally in New England and worldwide.
The Globe
is no stranger to translation tools. Its award-winning photography blog
The Big Picture
also uses Google Translate for automatically translating summaries and captions and for approving comments from around the world, including its
introduction to the World Cup
.
With that, let the games begin—
in whatever language you want
.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager
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
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
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