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Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Google

Google Translate gets phonetic translation and more

Google Translate just got a lot better, with a nice, clean new look and several new features. The first thing you'll notice is that you no longer have to click to translate. Translate now works instantly, as you type. If you're trying to translate something into a language with a non-Roman alphabet (like Chinese, for example) Google will also show the phonetic pronunciation underneath the translated characters.

If you're translating into English, you've got an even better option: you can hear an audio pronunciation of the English translation. This feature is awesome, and I'm looking forward to a time when Google inevitably implements it for other languages, too. There's a new feature for English-speakers, too, though: if you type in the phonetic, romanized version of a word from a non-Roman language (Google cheekily gives Fake Steve Jobs' trademark sign-off, "namaste," as an example), Translate will attempt to show the proper characters in the original language.

Filed under: Web services, Google, Web

Google launches universal translation tool for web publishers

Google Translate Widget
Google Translate certainly isn't the first machine-based translation engine that lets you translate text or entire web pages from one language to another. But it's certainly one of the most prevalent. And something tells me it's about to get even more ubiquitous, as Google has just launched a gadget that web publishers can use to let users translate pages to any language with the click of a button.

For instance, if you publish a web site in English but notice that a significant portion of your traffic comes from Germany, Japan, or elsewhere you can add a box to your sidebar (or anywhere on your web page) that lets readers choose their language from a drop-down menu. Google wil go to work translating the page and a small toolbar will pop up at the top of the page alerting readers tot he fact that the page has been translated. There's also a button to restore the site to its original language.

The most obvious benefit is that readers can translate your page without copying and pasting the URL into Google Translate. But there are a few other advantages as well. First, the tool adds a few letters to the end of the URL for any translated page, but it doesn't append "translate.google.com" to the start of the page, thereby robbing you of page views.

Second, if your site is in English and a visitor's browser settings are set to, say, Estonian, the toolbar should pop up automatically prompting them to translate the page. This could make your site a heck of a lot more attractive to international traffic.

Of course, the results are only as good as Google Translate's normal translations, which is to say, not very. While you can usually get the gist of articles translated by the service, you wouldn't really want to read literature converted from Russian to English via Google.

Filed under: Fun, Text, Time-Wasters, Web, Humor

Translation Party achieves hilarious results using Google Translate - Time Waster

Translation Party is a site that automates the old trick of running a sentence through machine translation until it's humorously unintelligible.

Instead of manually copy-pasting into Babelfish or Google Translate, you can just put in a phrase once, hit enter, and watch as Translation Party passes it back and forth between English and Japanese, getting further from your original meaning every time.

The translation doesn't stop until it reaches equilibrium, meaning that it repeatedly gets the same English result every time. Some phrases never achieve equilibrium, but Translation Party knows when that's happening and gives up after a while.

As an example of the strange results you might end up with, check out what came out when I put the first sentence of this post into Translation Party: "Party, machine translation, translation SAITOYUMORASU, perform the most common way to get to know me."

Filed under: Browsers, Web

Nice Translator add-on for Firefox makes short work of foreign text

Nice Translator Firefox add-on
Nice Translator is a web translation service that's powered by Google Translate, but which has a more attractive interface and a few nifty tricks like the ability to translate text into multiple language simultaneously.

The team behind Nice Translator has also released a rather nice Firefox add-on that lets you translate any text on any web site without leaving the page. Just highlight some text, right click and select Nicely Translate. Then select the languages you want to translate the text into and hit done. The plugin will spit out translations in up to 34 different languages.

via Carol's Vault

Filed under: Internet, Google, Education

Google's Translator Toolkit helps humans improve machine translation

Google's automated translation service, Google Translate, is one of the most popular language tools on the web, but Google has other ambitions in the translation field. The recently-launched Translator Toolkit is aimed at helping people create better translations of web pages, Wikipedia articles and Google Knol articles. These improved translations feed back into Google Translate, making it more accurate for everyday users.

If you're a translator, you can upload a file or enter a URL, and use the Translation Toolkit to improve on Google's automated translation results. Available tools include dictionaries and previously-saved user translations. Once you're done working on your translation, you can download it, or - for Wikipedia and Knol articles - publish it back to the source page.

Filed under: E-mail, Google

Gmail adds email translation features: Is this helpful?

Gmail translate
Google has a lot of different services under its roof. And sometimes it makes a lot of sense to combine them. For example, Google Docs is an online office suite. And people often send Office documents as email attachments. So it's kind of a no-brainer to let users open or preview PDF, DOC, and other file sent to their Gmail addresses.

Google also has a web-based language translator. It comes in handy if you're trying to read a news item on a web site in a language you don't speak. But I'm not sure I really need this feature in my email. I don't tend to correspond with people who speak languages that I can't understand via email. But maybe that's just me. Because Google just rolled out a new Gmail labs feature that lets you add a translation button to messages in your inbox in a foreign language.

I suppose there is one area where this could be useful. If you have a friend who speaks German as their first language, but who also speaks English, you may find yourself corresponding most frequently in English. But while he might be able to keep up with a little work, he may find it easier to hit the translate button. Unfortunately, computer translations are usually bad enough that even if his English isn't great, he may find them harder to understand after they're translated.

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Fried Babelfish takes Google Translate out of your browser

Fried Babelfish
Fried Babelfish is a desktop application for Windows that lets you translate text from one language into another. Despite its name, the program is powered by Google Translate, not Babelfish (an older version used the Babelfish web translation service).

You need an internet connection to use Fried Babelfish, but you do not need a web browser. This makes it easy to translate text in one window while typing in another without having to flip back and forth beween browser tabs or windows. It can come in handy if you're instant messaging someone who speaks a different language or if you just need to translate a few words on a web page you're reading.

Fried Babelfish was created as one of 35 freeware applications as part of the Donation Coder New Apps for the New Year challenge.

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Web services

BlahblahFish shows just how bad machine generated translation can be

BlahblahfishYou know how when you enter some French, German, or Japanese text into a web-based translator, the results always look a bit... suspect? BlahblahFish is a website that shows you what it looks like when you translate an English phrase into another language and then try to translate it back to English. The results are often baffling and occasionally downright funny.

If you get a particularly funny translation, you can post it on the site where other users can vote. Not surprisingly many of the translations that have been posted so far are somewhat dirty. But I also found out that "great googly moogly" translated into Korean comes out as something like "Indirect nine moogly where is serious."

[via Neatorama]

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Web

Two ways to translate to the NATO phonetic alphabet


I spend a lot of time on the phone with tech support personnel that don't understand ticket numbers and product codes I'm reading, so I find myself using the good old NATO phonetic alphabet fairly often.

Sometimes, though, I have a hard time remembering some of the letters. P, for example, is not Peter, it's Papa.

Thankfully, developer Nicholas Wagner has two handy utilities to help. Phonetic is offered as both a desktop application for Windows and Linux and a web-based utility. The RealBasic source code is also available for download.

The web version displays translation on the fly directly the text field. It's a tool well worth bookmarking for anyone that needs to spell things out to, say, computer software or hardware support workers.

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Education

Frengly does translation, but does it beat Babelfish?


The biggest players in the online translation game are Yahoo! Babelfish and Google Translate. They both have their unique charms, but a site called Frengly might offer a little competition. Its selection of languages isn't quite as extensive as Google's -- you won't find Hindi, Latvian or Catalan, for example -- but it does offer more languages and more combinations than Babelfish. Frengly's killer feature is auto-detection, though.

Frengly's language detection is even cooler than Google's, for a couple of reasons. First, you don't have to select auto-detection from a language list, like you do in Google Translate. If it's automatic, why should it take an extra step?
Second, you don't have to select a target language from a menu. You can just click it, and the original text remains on screen. If you want another language, just click again.

Frengly doesn't do webpages, and doesn't have a bookmarklet. If that's the bulk of what you want to do, stick with Google for now. On the other hand, it does save a list of your translations. If you're looking for a translator to help you do homework or understand a few words in a book you're reading, look no further.

Filed under: Web services, Google, web 2.0

Google adds instant translation to Google Reader

Google Reader translate
Google Reader, Bloglines and other RSS readers make it easy to keep on top of the latest news from dozens, or even hundreds of web pages without actually visiting those pages. But if you want to read a web site that constantly covers news you're interested in, and just happens to be in a language you don't speak, in the past you've needed to exit your RSS reader and load the page in Google Translate or Windows Live Translate or a similar service.

Or you could use a service like Mloovi to translate the RSS feed, but Mloovi has a few limitations, like the inability to show pictures or full feeds. Now it looks like Google is taking things into its own hands, by combining Google Reader with Google Translate.

Here's how it works. Just subscribe to a blog or news site in another language (assuming you can find the subscribe button). Then go to the feed settings in Google Reader and select "Translate into my language." That's it. You only have to do this once per feed and Google Reader will automatically translate that page until you tell it to stop.

Keep in mind, these are machine-generated translations, so they're far from perfect. But if you don't have time to learn French just to read a few articles from Le Monde from time to time, this could be the next best thing. Or maybe the thing after that.

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Time-Wasters

Unintelligencer Maeks U Rite Dum - Time Waster

The Unintelligencer is full of win. Go there and make yourself sound dumb.
It's always nice to have a good laugh during an otherwise stressful workday, and what's more fun than laughing at outright supidity?

The Unintelligencer uses an array of sophisticated linguistic algorithms to convert your text from perfectly suitable English into the unrecognizable drivel you've gotten used to seeing on YouTube, Facebook, and all your other favorite sites.

Let's try an example from a favorite movie of mine: "i haved an wonderful girlfriend linda. 2gethr wee drove too small cabin ins da mountains. t seems an archeologist hads kum tew dis remote place 2 translate + study him latess phidn: necronomiconexmortis. thee book uv de ded."

Oh, the good times you'll have with this. Send that important departmental memo as a Moron, or shoot the moon and render it Incomprehensible. Unintelligencer offers 5 subtle shades of idiocy!

It's web based, so users of any operating system can utilize this fantastic - and unbelievably useful - tool. I'd like to see a reverse translation so I can finally understand what the hell some of these lolcat people are talking about.

Filed under: Audio, web 2.0

Forvo Helps You Speak Like A Native

Learning a foreign language on your own can be frustrating, but it's much easier if you've got a good coach to help you out. Forvo aims to help out by providing a database of words pronounced in various languages by native speakers.

Forvo is still growing, and currently boasts a user base of about 2,700 contributors and 22 editors. Anyone can register and submit new words they'd like to hear pronounced or add their own pronunciations to existing words. The site makes it easy to learn topical words by tagging submissions in groups like fruit, sport, or bad words (for example).

There are currently 186 different languages supported: everything from English, French, Spanish, and Italian to Gaelic, Hawaiian, and Maori. Obviously, some languages are more active than others (read: we want to learn more Maori words!).

Read more →

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Lingro: Look up definitions, translations on any page

Lingro
Ever find yourself puzzling over an unfamiliar word on a web page? Sure, you could open a new browser tab and look it up at Dictionary.com. Or you could just drag a Lingro bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and hit it to make every word on a web page clickable. When you select a word a definition will pop up, assuming you've set the tool to translate from English to English. You can also click on the flag iconts to translate words into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish, or Swedish.

The definitions are culled from publicly available dictionaries and user contributions filed under a Creative Commons license. So if you find a word without a definition, a message will pop up asking if you'd like to contribute one. Of course, the odds of your clicking the word if you already knew the meaning are pretty slim (unless you're say, writing a review of Lingro).

You can also use Lingro the old fashioned way, by visiting the service's home page and typing in a word or entering a web address to translate. There's even a service that lets you upload a file from your desktop for translation into another language.

Honestly, we didn't have much luck translating entire web sites. But Lingro's dictionary definitions and single word translations seem pretty good.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google

Google Translate becomes even more useful

Google TranslateGoogle has udated its language translation page, adding support for Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, and Swedish. That brings the total number of language you can translate to and from to 24.

But the most useful feature of the new Google Translate is the automatic language detection feature. You no longer have to select the language of a web page in order to translate it to English. Just choose "Detect language" and Google will attempt to figure out the source language for you and translate the page or text to the language of your choice.

Of course, the machine translation is still far from perfect. But awkward phrases and baffling idiom translations are a small price to pay for being able to read Norwegian newspapers.

[via Google Operating System]

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