For some time, you could use Google Translate to translate chunks of text, or even whole web pages, instantly, from one language into another. For non-native English speakers, researchers, or just the curious, this feature has allowed users to access and digest information in languages they do not read or speak. Google Translate was born out of the belief that the search for information must be able to transcend language barriers, and the librarian who sent us the following note surely agrees:
"I'm a librarian at a major public library. A couple of days ago, a woman approached the reference desk and asked about finding local government information in Spanish. I showed her how to use your language translation page, and her response was so enthusiastic I was overwhelmed. She told me I opened a whole new world for her! It was a great feeling to help this woman!"But what if this library patron could not only translate chunks of text or single web pages? What if she could conduct, in Spanish, full searches over English content and read the complete results in her native tongue? Well, now she can. We're happy to announce that as of today, users can now search in their native languages for content in other languages, and have that content served to them in their own languages. Instantly.Check out Google Translate at http://translate.google.com and then select the "Search Results" tab. Please note that while this feature is currently available for a handful of major languages, we're working to expand this list.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Found in Translation
Translate Text Written in Hindi to English with Google Translation
In another first, Google Translation tool has added support for Hindi, the official language of India. Google earlier introduced the English to Hindi Transliterator feature in Blogger that lets you type Hindi using English characters.
With this new feature, you can easily translate web pages, documents and blocks of text written in Hindi to English language instantly - it works both ways so you may also use the same tool for converting English text to Hindi Devanagri script.
If you encounter a web page in Google Search results that’s written in Hindi, Google adds a "Translate this page" link next to the page so that you can directly read the Hindi page in English via the Google Translate tool.
Here’s the BBC Hindi website converted to English using Google Translate. Though it’s a machine based translation, the results are fairly accurate.
With this new feature, you can easily translate web pages, documents and blocks of text written in Hindi to English language instantly - it works both ways so you may also use the same tool for converting English text to Hindi Devanagri script.
If you encounter a web page in Google Search results that’s written in Hindi, Google adds a "Translate this page" link next to the page so that you can directly read the Hindi page in English via the Google Translate tool.
Here’s the BBC Hindi website converted to English using Google Translate. Though it’s a machine based translation, the results are fairly accurate.
Google Translate bug mixes up Heath Ledger, Tom Cruise
UPDATE: Google representatives informed CNET News.com on Thursday that this "internal issue with Google Translate" has been fixed.Gawker has unearthed a rather odd bug in the Google Translate software: its English-to-Spanish translator converts the name of the actor Heath Ledger, who died tragically on Tuesday, to the name of another actor--Tom Cruise. So if you enter in "I will miss Heath Ledger," Google Translate will come back with "Voy a perder Tom Cruise."
This looks like a simple bug in the system, perhaps the work of a bored Googler somewhere in the world. It only affects the English-to-Spanish translation; translations from English into other languages leave "Heath Ledger" intact, and "Tom Cruise" remains "Tom Cruise" in a Spanish-to-English translation. And the bug only appears to apply to the name "Heath Ledger," as substituting a number of other actors' names (Owen Wilson, John Travolta, Russell Crowe, Jake Gyllenhaal) also fails to yield "Tom Cruise."
It'd all be pretty funny were it not for the terrible circumstances surrounding Ledger, 28, who was found dead after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills; there's nothing tasteless about it, thankfully, but cracking jokes or hinting at Scientology conspiracies just doesn't seem all that fitting. We've contacted Google for comment. But we're guessing that this won't be a very pressing issue for Mountain View.
This looks like a simple bug in the system, perhaps the work of a bored Googler somewhere in the world. It only affects the English-to-Spanish translation; translations from English into other languages leave "Heath Ledger" intact, and "Tom Cruise" remains "Tom Cruise" in a Spanish-to-English translation. And the bug only appears to apply to the name "Heath Ledger," as substituting a number of other actors' names (Owen Wilson, John Travolta, Russell Crowe, Jake Gyllenhaal) also fails to yield "Tom Cruise."
It'd all be pretty funny were it not for the terrible circumstances surrounding Ledger, 28, who was found dead after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills; there's nothing tasteless about it, thankfully, but cracking jokes or hinting at Scientology conspiracies just doesn't seem all that fitting. We've contacted Google for comment. But we're guessing that this won't be a very pressing issue for Mountain View.
Google Translate Now Eats its Own Dog Food
Google has switched the translation system on its Google Translate service to its own technology. Previously, Google had used the translation engine from Systran to power the feature (in all but three languages), which allows you to enter text in one language and have it translated to another. Here’s how it works according to Franz Och of the Google Research team:
“We feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We have achieved very good results in research evaluations.”
The service also lets you translate an entire Web page into your language of choice, or search pages written in different languages. Here’s a look at Mashable in Spanish using Google Translate. How’d they do on the headline?
“We feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We have achieved very good results in research evaluations.”
The service also lets you translate an entire Web page into your language of choice, or search pages written in different languages. Here’s a look at Mashable in Spanish using Google Translate. How’d they do on the headline?
Search without boundaries
Search without boundaries
5/23/2007 05:06:00 PM Posted by Franz Och, Research Scientist; Maureen Heymans, Software Engineer; and Jeff Chin, International Product ManagerOne of our goals at Google is to provide access to all the world's information. A big obstacle for that is the language barrier. If the ideal result page to a query is written in a language that you don't understand, then up until now it would be very hard to get access to this information. Today, we launched a new feature on Google Translate that takes a big step towards addressing this problem.Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). If you're looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type "wine tasting events in Bordeaux" into the search box on the "Search results" tab on Google Translate. You'll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English. Similarly, an Arabic speaker could look for restaurants in New York, by searching for "مطعم نيويورك"; or a Chinese speaker could look for documents on machine learning on the English web by looking for"机器学习".While machine translation is not perfect, it's usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access. We think this feature will be particularly useful for our international users since although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the internet is still in English.
5/23/2007 05:06:00 PM Posted by Franz Och, Research Scientist; Maureen Heymans, Software Engineer; and Jeff Chin, International Product ManagerOne of our goals at Google is to provide access to all the world's information. A big obstacle for that is the language barrier. If the ideal result page to a query is written in a language that you don't understand, then up until now it would be very hard to get access to this information. Today, we launched a new feature on Google Translate that takes a big step towards addressing this problem.Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). If you're looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type "wine tasting events in Bordeaux" into the search box on the "Search results" tab on Google Translate. You'll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English. Similarly, an Arabic speaker could look for restaurants in New York, by searching for "مطعم نيويورك"; or a Chinese speaker could look for documents on machine learning on the English web by looking for"机器学习".While machine translation is not perfect, it's usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access. We think this feature will be particularly useful for our international users since although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the internet is still in English.
How To Help Improve Google Translate Results
We’ve discussed Google’s language translation tools previously, such as Google Translate (Beta). But did you know you can help improve the results of this machine-translation?
First, let’s have a short recap of how to translate from one language to another simply by typing your word, phrase or sentences in a text box.
Step 1: Go to http://translate.google.com.
Step 2: Input your sentence in the “Original Text” box. Let me try this sentence, and let’s translate it from English to the French language.
Step 3: Hit the “Translate” button and viola! A near perfect translation. After pressing “Translate”, Google Translate shoud immediately show the result to the right of the screen, as shown below.
Or is it perfect at all?
Let us assume that you have sent this translated text to someone who speaks and understands the French. Unfortunately, your friend tells you that it’s not a good translation of the original text. Too bad, but no worries. You can come back to the Google Translate, input the same text in the “Original Text” box, hit “translate”. After seeing the result, scroll down a little bit and see an option called:
Suggest a better translation
First, let’s have a short recap of how to translate from one language to another simply by typing your word, phrase or sentences in a text box.
Step 1: Go to http://translate.google.com.
Step 2: Input your sentence in the “Original Text” box. Let me try this sentence, and let’s translate it from English to the French language.
Step 3: Hit the “Translate” button and viola! A near perfect translation. After pressing “Translate”, Google Translate shoud immediately show the result to the right of the screen, as shown below.
Or is it perfect at all?
Let us assume that you have sent this translated text to someone who speaks and understands the French. Unfortunately, your friend tells you that it’s not a good translation of the original text. Too bad, but no worries. You can come back to the Google Translate, input the same text in the “Original Text” box, hit “translate”. After seeing the result, scroll down a little bit and see an option called:
Suggest a better translation
Google Translate Wordpress Plugin
The Google Translator plugin allows Wordpress to add a number of alternate languages to your blog.
This plugin is derived from Scott Hough’s WP Translate, but makes a number of changes:
The Google Translate service is used, which does a much better job of maintaining page layout then Babelfish.
Height and width attributes are included for all images.
‘rel=nofollow’ has been added to all links to prevent search engines from following them.
Alternate text for all images have been improved.
The plugin fully validates under XHTML.
Download
Download Google Translate v.3.24.07
This plugin is derived from Scott Hough’s WP Translate, but makes a number of changes:
The Google Translate service is used, which does a much better job of maintaining page layout then Babelfish.
Height and width attributes are included for all images.
‘rel=nofollow’ has been added to all links to prevent search engines from following them.
Alternate text for all images have been improved.
The plugin fully validates under XHTML.
Download
Download Google Translate v.3.24.07
Google Translate Video Links
Changes Links to Google Videos directly to the Flash Player Swf
Google Video Link Translator changes the links on the Play buttons to go directly to the Flash Player instead of embeding it in the current webpage... in other words, you get the full experience, not just a 10 second demo. Try it. You'll like it.
05.Oct. 2005 : Update
OK; so there are a few changes: 1. You are now able to save any video to a FLV file, so you won't have to download it every time you want to watch it. Just click the thumbnail and save the file (it has the same filename for every video, because the actual video source is specified via the parameters: just rename it to something meaningfull, like monty-spam.flv)
2. At the bottom of every page there's now a Browse button to select a local file for playback. Just browse and hit "Play Saved File"
The next version will probably sport support for a locally installed instance of the player and cookie support for some infos as well as buffered playback (specifying a local source for certain search results)
Google Video Link Translator changes the links on the Play buttons to go directly to the Flash Player instead of embeding it in the current webpage... in other words, you get the full experience, not just a 10 second demo. Try it. You'll like it.
05.Oct. 2005 : Update
OK; so there are a few changes: 1. You are now able to save any video to a FLV file, so you won't have to download it every time you want to watch it. Just click the thumbnail and save the file (it has the same filename for every video, because the actual video source is specified via the parameters: just rename it to something meaningfull, like monty-spam.flv)
2. At the bottom of every page there's now a Browse button to select a local file for playback. Just browse and hit "Play Saved File"
The next version will probably sport support for a locally installed instance of the player and cookie support for some infos as well as buffered playback (specifying a local source for certain search results)
Why maintain a multi-lingual site
Why maintain a multi-lingual site while Google Translate can do that for you?Simply add your content and your visitors can view it translated with just a click. Your visitors won't even know it's translated by Google.Demo 4.7.x: http://drupal.owahab.com/47x/Demo 5.x: http://drupal.owahab.com/5x/
Known issues:1. Changing language for logged in users causes them to be kicked out.2. Trying to change language back for logged in users gives a validation error.
Maintainer can be contacted for paid customizations.
Known issues:1. Changing language for logged in users causes them to be kicked out.2. Trying to change language back for logged in users gives a validation error.
Maintainer can be contacted for paid customizations.
Google Translator Boomerang
Google Translator Boomerang is a silly little program that uses the Google Translation engine to translate your english text to foreign languages and then back again into english, for some amusing results.
Use it to generate zen poetry or examine how well the translation of your text really matches with your intentions. You might be surprised to learn how your words may come across in another language.
Use it to generate zen poetry or examine how well the translation of your text really matches with your intentions. You might be surprised to learn how your words may come across in another language.
University Research Program for Google Translate
The University Research Program for Google Translate provides researchers, in the field of automatic machine translation, tools to help compare and contrast with, and build on top of, Google's statistical machine translation system.
Participation in the program will allow researchers programmatic access to Google's translation service.
A translation request returns either:
A single translation, the highest scoring output of Google Translate
As above but with detailed word alignment information
A list of the n-best translations with detailed scoring information
These options can support research into n-best reranking (machine learning), additional translation components, system combinations, and who knows what else researchers may come up with.
The program currently supports translations between the following language pairs:
English <=> Arabic
English <=> Chinese
English <=> Russian
Participation in the program will allow researchers programmatic access to Google's translation service.
A translation request returns either:
A single translation, the highest scoring output of Google Translate
As above but with detailed word alignment information
A list of the n-best translations with detailed scoring information
These options can support research into n-best reranking (machine learning), additional translation components, system combinations, and who knows what else researchers may come up with.
The program currently supports translations between the following language pairs:
English <=> Arabic
English <=> Chinese
English <=> Russian
Google Switches to Its Own Translation System
Google switched the translation system from Systran to its own machine translation system for all the 25 language pairs available on the site. Until now, Google used its own system only for Arabic, Chinese, and Russian."Most state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars. Several research systems, including ours, take a different approach: we feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model," explains Franz Och.You can compare the new Google Translate with Babel Fish, a site that uses Systran to provide translations. The switch is a sign that Google's system has improved a lot and could soon be ready for expanding its coverage.
Google Translate
Google has been kind enough to provide a free high powered translation facility that anyone can use called Google Translate. It allows you to translate custom blocks of text that you type or paste into the translation page, or to provide it with a web page URL and it will fetch the page and display the translated page in your browser.
If you do a lot of translations from one particular language to another, you can make that your default choice from the Preferences page, saving you from having to repeatedly select the language pair from the language pair drop down box. If you don’t find the language you wish to translate in their selection box, you may want to contact Google and become a volunteer translator for the Google Translate project.
The translation is not done by humans but is a machine translation. This means that specialized software running on Google’s servers does the translation, instead of human translators. This means that translations done by Google Translate are good, but should not be relied upon for critical mission documents like legal papers, accounting related documents, medical documents or anything where a mistake could be costly due to you. However, it is one of the best we’ve seen and for trying to understand what a foreign body of text is saying, most of the time it will do a good job for you.
If you do a lot of translations from one particular language to another, you can make that your default choice from the Preferences page, saving you from having to repeatedly select the language pair from the language pair drop down box. If you don’t find the language you wish to translate in their selection box, you may want to contact Google and become a volunteer translator for the Google Translate project.
The translation is not done by humans but is a machine translation. This means that specialized software running on Google’s servers does the translation, instead of human translators. This means that translations done by Google Translate are good, but should not be relied upon for critical mission documents like legal papers, accounting related documents, medical documents or anything where a mistake could be costly due to you. However, it is one of the best we’ve seen and for trying to understand what a foreign body of text is saying, most of the time it will do a good job for you.
Supported Language Translation Pairs
Supported Language Translation Pairs
The Google AJAX Language API currently supports the following translation pairs. The technology is constantly improving and the team is working hard to expand this list as well. And again, you can visit Google Translate to view an up to date list.
Arabic to English
Chinese to English
Chinese (Simplified to Traditional)
Chinese (Traditional to Simplified)
Dutch to English
English to Arabic
English to Chinese (Simplified)
English to Chinese (Traditional)
English to Dutch
English to French
English to German
English to Greek
English to Italian
English to Japanese
English to Korean
English to Portuguese
English to Russian
English to Spanish
French to English
French to German
German to English
German to French
Greek to English
Italian to English
Japanese to English
Korean to English
Portuguese to English
Russian to English
Spanish to English
The Google AJAX Language API currently supports the following translation pairs. The technology is constantly improving and the team is working hard to expand this list as well. And again, you can visit Google Translate to view an up to date list.
Arabic to English
Chinese to English
Chinese (Simplified to Traditional)
Chinese (Traditional to Simplified)
Dutch to English
English to Arabic
English to Chinese (Simplified)
English to Chinese (Traditional)
English to Dutch
English to French
English to German
English to Greek
English to Italian
English to Japanese
English to Korean
English to Portuguese
English to Russian
English to Spanish
French to English
French to German
German to English
German to French
Greek to English
Italian to English
Japanese to English
Korean to English
Portuguese to English
Russian to English
Spanish to English
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