Google Translator Boomerang

Filed under: Fun, Windows

Google Translator Boomerang

by Jordan Running May 5th 2006

Having fun with machine translation services is by no means a new pastime. Even back when it was at altavista.digital.com, people were feeding text into AltaVista's Babelfish and translating it from one language to another to another and back again to see what would come out. It's a fun way to kill some time, but why kill time when we can make the computer kill it for us? Google Translator Boomerang is a Windows app that uses Google's translation service to translate your text to another language (or nine) and back again, just for kicks. It's pretty configurable, letting you choose your languages and the number of "loops." It's donationware, meaning it's free to use but donations are welcome.

Tags: boomerange, donationware, fun, google, translation, translatorboomerang, windows

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Spencer said 1:40PM on 5-05-2006

Somehow "I think, therefore I am" became "One of the buildings."

O_o

Alessandro Vernet said 2:11PM on 5-05-2006

Automatic translation is not only fun, it is also quite useful. Use it to learning Spanish, to help you draft that email in French, or to understand what people are saying on that web page in German.

In some cases, it is useful to be able to see an "instant" translation of what you type, instead of having to click on that "submit" button, wait for the result, modify your text, click that "submit" button again... Have a look at this page that does exactly that, using Ajax for the front-end, and making calls to the Google translation services:

http://www.orbeon.com/ops/goto-example/xforms-translate

Alex

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