Google Translate Blog

Breaking down the language barrier—six years in

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Official Google BlogNIST Machine Translation EvaluationWe announced our statistical MT approachEsperantotranslate.google.comBabel fishPosted by Franz Och, Distinguished Research Scientist, Google Translate

Localize your apps and content more easily -- new formats in Translator Toolkit

Friday, March 30, 2012

At Google, we put a lot of energy into helping localize the world’s information to make it more useful to more people. It’s not just about localizing our own products -- we want to provide tools that make it easy for translators and developers around the world to localize their own apps and content. Google Translator Toolkit is our online translation tool for amateur and professional translators -- it’s built on Google Translate and supports more than 100,000 language pairs.

This week, the Translator Toolkit team has launched support for four new translation-related file formats:

Android Resource (.xml)

Application Resource Bundle (.arb)

Chrome Extension (.json)

GNU gettext-based (.po)

With these new file formats, you can use Translator Toolkit to localize your apps and other products and content much more quickly and easily.

For example, to translate your Android application, go into the res/values directory and upload strings.xml into Translator Toolkit -- Translator Toolkit will now automatically translate it. You can then share your translations with amateur or professional translators, who can localize the text using Translator Toolkit’s WYSIWYG online editor.

When you’re finished, you can export your translated application and store it in a locale-specific directory in Android. Voilà -- easy localization! 翻译起来太方便了!

In addition, we’ve made the Translator Toolkit interface more intuitive for these new file formats so users can translate faster and more accurately. For example, you can turn on ‘Customized colors’ so translators can annotate the edited segments, ‘Number of characters in the segment’ to make sure the text doesn’t run too long (very important for mobile devices), and ‘Synchronized scrolling’ so you can scroll the original and translated text at the same time, which makes navigation much easier.

With these new file formats and UI features, along with the file formats we already support (.aea, .srt, .html), we hope Translator Toolkit can help you reach more users around the world.When you’re ready, give Google Translator Toolkit a try and suggest any improvements you’d like to see so we can work on making it even better. Posted by Chris Yang, Product Manager, and Haidong Shao, Software Engineer, Translator Toolkit

Using labels in Translator Toolkit

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Google Translator Toolkit, an online translation tool built on Google Translate, greatly simplifies the translation workflow through its WYSIWYG editor, real-time collaboration and translation management system in the cloud. As amateur translators, we often use Translator Toolkit for projects like translating Wikipedia articles or editing subtitle files for YouTube videos. However, as we work on more and more projects at once, we’ve found we want more powerful ways to organize our Translator Toolkit documents.

So we’re adding labels in Translator Toolkit. We’ve updated them this week, and we thought you’d enjoy a peek at the method to our madness.

With labels, you can organize your Translator Toolkit documents into any categories you define yourself -- ‘high priority,’ ‘wikipedia,’ ‘work,’ ‘later,’ etc. -- and in any combination (the beauty of labels is that they can overlap, so one document might be both ‘work’ and ‘high priority’).

To put a label on a Translator Toolkit document, just select the file and then click ‘Label’ to apply an existing label (or labels). You can also create a new label.

To access all the documents with a given label (or labels), navigate to ‘My labels’ on the left side and choose the labels you’re interested in.

Labels are just one way to make it easier to access and organize your Translator Toolkit documents. Hopefully these changes help you manage more complex projects -- please let us know if you have any feedback. Posted by Chenjun Wu, Software Engineer, and Chris Yang, Product Manager, Translator Toolkit

Translating patents with the European Patent Office

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Last March, we signed an agreement with the European Patent Office (EPO) to break down linguistic barriers and improve the machine translation of patents. Today, we’ve released an update to our Google Translate system that incorporates the EPO’s parallel patent texts and allows translation between English and French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish. This improved system is now part of the EPO’s Espacenet service, and goes under the name Patent Translate. Espacenet provides free access to millions of patent documents worldwide - and its users can use Patent Translate to read patents from around the world in their own language. Here’s a video that shows how it works: Using the EPO’s parallel texts, we’ve been able to improve our ability to translate patents, as the following examples show: Polymerisable ink

Source: une tête d'impression pour diriger une encre polymérisable par rayonnement vers un substrat reçu sur le support

Old translation: a print head to direct a radiation curable ink to a substrate on the support received

New translation: a print head for directing radiation polymerisable ink to a substrate received on the support

Ultrasonic vibration

Source: The crystals supply the required ultrasonic vibration needed to drive both the horn and the attached cutting tip during phacoemulsification and are controlled by the console.

Old translation: I cristalli di fornire la vibrazione necessaria ad ultrasuoni necessari per guidare sia il corno e la punta di sezionamento annesso durante facoemulsificazione e sono controllati dalla console.

New translation: I cristalli forniscono la vibrazione ultrasonica richiesta necessaria per pilotare sia il corno e la punta da taglio allegata durante la facoemulsificazione e sono controllati dalla console.

We share a similar vision to the EPO, that machine translation can help to overcome language barriers - and help to make the information contained in patents universally accessible and useful. While the improved system is pretty good, machine translation is a challenging computer science problem and does not always deliver perfect results. But it can be a very useful way for people to search and read patents that aren’t written in their language.We’re excited to continue our collaboration with the EPO. We look forward to adding more languages - and showing how this public-private partnership will further improve access to patents for people around the world.Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate

An easier way to type in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Hebrew

Monday, February 27, 2012

Knowing what you want to translate is sometimes only half the battle. You may have a letter from your secret admirer sitting in front of you, but if you can’t type the words into Google Translate the meaning can remain elusive.

Typing in languages which use different character sets can be a frustrating problem in computer labs, internet cafés, and sometimes even on home computers if standard Latin alphabet keyboards are the only option available.

To make typing in these languages easier we began including virtual keyboards and transliteration input methods in Google Translate last year, and we’ve been working to expand that support over time. Today we’re happy to announce three major additions to our input methods: Japanese, Vietnamese, and Hebrew language support.

To use transliteration input methods, just select the ‘Allow phonetic typing’ option when typing in Google Translate.
Since releasing transliteration support for these languages a few days ago, we’ve noticed significant improvements in the the speed of input (for instance, Vietnamese text input has become 20% faster with the new input method) which we hope to see translate into a better experience for everyone.

Keep an eye out over the next few months as we add support for more languages.

Would you like to use Google’s transliteration input methods or virtual keyboards across the whole web? Try out our Chrome extension, which includes transliteration for over 20 languages and virtual keyboards for 70 more.

Posted by C. Andrew Warren, Associate Product Manager, Internationalization Team

Tutmonda helplingvo por ĉiuj homoj

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Today, we are adding Esperanto to Google Translate, making it our 64th supported language.

Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof started his quest for an easy-to-learn language shared by all people in the 1870s and first published the ideas in 1887 with his book Unua Librothis blog posttranslate.google.comPosted by Thorsten Brants, Research Scientist, Google Translate

Sometimes it’s easier just to write it

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

With our most recent update to Google Translate for Android, we’ve added an experimental new input feature: handwriting on your touchscreen.
Maybe you’d like to see if three 木 make a 森, but you don’t have a Japanese keyboard installed? Just use the handwriting icon

Our goal is to break down the language barrier, all the time, everywhere. By adding handwriting input directly into our Android app we hope to help you get translation done even more quickly and easily. Sometimes you don’t know how to say what you want translated, sometimes you can’t type it, and sometimes it’s easier just to write it. We think of handwriting on the touchscreen as another natural input that you may want to use to complement the keyboard, microphone, or camera.

This is still an experimental feature. It’s available in Chinese and Japanese, and you can enable it for English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish if you like. (We currently only support single-character input for Chinese and Japanese.) Just as with speech recognition and our translations themselves, our handwriting recognition happens in the cloud, allowing us to continually improve accuracy without requiring you to download new versions of the app.

Download Google Translate in Android Market — it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 1.5 and up. Then, you can easily find out whether 自 really means ‘server rack with a Wi-Fi antenna’.

Posted by Daniel Keysers, Software Engineer