Google 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.
There are plenty of web services that will let you translate chunks of text from one language to another. And Reverso is certainly one of them. But Reverso has a few tricks up its sleeve that you won't find in Google Translate, Windows Live Translator, or Babel Fish.
Near the top of the Reverso web page are four tabs: Translation, Dictionary, Conjugator, and More. The translation tool does a decent job of translating text to and from several languages: English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. But if you click on the Dictionary tab, you can enter a word, choose a dictionary, and get a more precise definition. And if you click on the conjugate tab, you can practice conjugating your verbs in the language of your choice.
Unlike many other popular web translation services, Reverso does not offer a way to translate entire web pages online. But Windows users can purchase Reverso's desktop application that offers this feature. Or you could, you know, use another service if and when you want to translate complete pages.
There was a time when Facebook only came in one flavor: English. Well, no longer; there is now an option under "Languages," which you can get to via "Account," to change Facebook's primary language to Spanish.
Currently, there are about 2.8 million registered Facebook users in Latin America and Spain. Both regions will begin to load the Spanish version of Facebook by default starting on Monday, but users will have the option to change the default language back to English should the change be considered bothersome.
Though critics are weary of Facebook's ability to maintain itself and its large social-networking market-share, the company is now destined to grow internationally. Good luck, Mr. Zuckerberg.
Need to communicate with a colleague, client, or eBay seller in China, but don't speak Chinese? SpeakLike wants to help. The service, which launches in private beta this week provides real-time chat translation services.
SpeakLike works by using a combination of machine and human translation. As you send a message, a machine will automatically translate it to another language, while a human translator looks things over to make sure the translation is accurate.
SpeakLike plans to charge by the message. So rather than paying by the word or minute as you would with most translation services, you'll pay $.10 per message. It's not clear if there's a word limit on messages, but we're going to assume you can't write a 10 paragraph message and then hit send.
At launch, SpeakLike supports English, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese. Human translators will only be available during limited hours while the service is in beta. But eventually the goal is to offer 24/7 translation services.
In order to user SpeakLike you'll need to install the company's chat client. The service is not compatible with AIM, MSN Messenger, or any other service. And there's currently no option to save transcripts of your chat. But you'd be amazed what a little copying and pasting can do to remedy that situation.
There's no shortage of services out there that let you convert text to poorly pronounced, mechanical sounding speech. But SpokenText has a few cool features that you don't see too often. Not only can you convert Word, PDF, PowerPoint, TXT, or HTML documents to audio files, but there's also a Firefox extension that lets you select text from any website.
Here are a few other features that make SpokenText stand out:
Choose from several voices, including male and female
Translate English text to spoken French or German
Choose the number of spoken words per minute (although if you set this too high, the recordings will sound awful)
Save files in MP3 or M4B formats
You can also share recordings with other users by sharing your URL or embedding an audio player on your web site.
Chatting with people who speak another language just got a lot easier thanks to Google's translation bots.
The translation bots provide a way to translate between Google Talk contacts in a group chat or as a translation tool. All you have to do is add one of 29 bots as a contact using their two letter language abbreviation. So in order to translate from an English conversation to a French one, you would add "en2fr@bot.talk.google.com" as a Google Talk contact. Now you can enter a group chat with a user who speaks French, bring the chat bot into the conversation, and the bot will translate everything you say into French and everything the other person says into English.
If you have a Blackberry, the Google Talk client will also function as a translator while on the go. It works the same way, by adding the appropriate translation bot to your chat conversation.
Google is also calling all developers to build their own XMPP based bots for such things as weather services and games that can be added into the Google Talk open protocol.
The beauty of the web is that your personal homepage could have an international audience. Of course, visitors from Russia, Korea, or Japan might have a hard time reading your English-only website.
There are plenty of tools out there that let proactive internet users translate a web page. But you can also make it easy on visitors by adding translation widgets to your blog or web site.
This week Microsoft released a widget for Windows Live Translator. And it's pretty slick. All you have to do is copy a tiny bit of code to your web page, and a drop down box will show up on your site letting visitors know that they can "translate this site" in a variety of languages including German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese.
If you're more of a Google person, we also dug up a widget that uses Google Translate, but it's a bit less elegant. This widget will simply add a series of links to your page that let visitors know they can translate the site into Arabic, German, Portuguese, Chinese, and so on.
What tricks do you have for making your web site internationally friendly?
Update: Google has launched an official translation widget for your web page as well. Their widget doesn't blend into all web sites very well just yet (it assumes you have a white background), but does offer a faster translation.
Google has dumped Systran, the company that had been powering much of Google's web-based language translation service. Google had developed its own machine translation skill, but until recently, Google was only using its own technology to translate Arabic, Chinese, and Russian text and web sites. Now Google is using its own engine to translate 25 different language pairs.
Machine translation is an imperfect science. The computer translates most words literally and doesn't do a great job of capturing nuance or proper sentence structure. It doesn't appear that Google Translate is any more accurate today than it was a few weeks ago. But the move should help Google set its service apart from competing offerings from Babel Fish and Microsoft. Both companies' translation services are powered by Systran.
When Google launched an e-mail client back in 2004, the company best known for its search engine completely changed the way we think about e-mail. While Yahoo! and MSN were offering users mailboxes measured in megabytes, Gmail users had an unprecedented 1GB of storage. Messages were sorted by filters and labels and not folders. The threaded message view made it easier to keep up with conversations, and a machine was reading all of your e-mail to serve up relevant ads.
While Gmail inbox sizes have continued to grow, the user interface hasn't changed much in the last three years. But it looks like that could soon change. Googling Google reports there's evidence of a "new version" on the horizon.
Google relies on users who speak multiple languages to help translate the text of various Google services from English into other languages. One anonymous user was translating some Gmail language when he came across a box that implied a selected group of Google beta testers had access to a new version of the Gmail interface. We have no idea what's different in that version or how long it will be before we see a wider release.
We're hoping for folders. Or a Hello Kitty skin. Either one will do.
Time use to be that you needed to carry a thick book in your back pocket when traveling if you wanted to find the nearest bus station, restroom or brothel hotel.
But these days the quickest way to translate something from Japanese to English and back again is by typing it into an online service. There are dozens of online translators out there, letting you read complete websites or translate snippets of text.
But once your tools move online, they're not limited to a certain type of device. You can translate items with pretty much any web browser or operating system. Heck, it turns out you don't even need a computer. Fuji Xerox is showing off a prototype copy machine that can translate documents as it copies.
Insert a Japanese document and the copier will access an internet service to translate the text into Chinese, English or Korean. The printer access a dedicated server, which we expect is about as good as any other machine-based translator out there. In other words, expect the copier to spit out a few nonsense sentences.
It's a neat idea, but at least when you try to translate a web page online you're not wasting any paper when you wind up with a completely garbled machine translation.
The arms race between Microsoft and Google has just gone up another notch with the release of Windows Live Translator. Much like Google's Translate Tool, Windows Live Translator lets you enter a block of text for translation from one language or another, or you can enter a URL to have an entire web page translated. Also like Google, Microsoft's web-based translation tool is powered by Systran.
But the interface is quite different. Enter a URL in Google Translate, choose your language options, and you essentially see a full screen version of the website with the text replaced by a computer's best guess of what each word and phrase means. Windows Live Translator doesn't have a full screen option, but gives you a choice of views:
See each page side by side
See one page on top of the other
See the original page, with each line translated as you hover your mouse over it
See a translated page with the original text of each line displayed as you hover your mouse over it
You have a variety of languages to choose from, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. But as with any machine based translation, don't expect Windows Live Translator to give you a perfect translation. But it should give you a good idea of how much that Japan-only notebook computer you've had your eye on really costs.
Google has added a new feature to its translation tool: "Suggest a better translation." When you're reading a Google translation, the new tool gives you a chance to catch mistakes and send them to Google, which will help the developers improve translations down the road. It's not clear if this is a learning feature of the translation software or if a real person will read your suggestion and figure out whether to make a change.
Here's how it works. As you read a page, if you move your mouse pointer to a line of text, that text will be highlighted and a little "suggest a better translation" link will pop up.
Of course, this begs the question, why are you using Google to translate pages if you already know how to read them?
Right now only a few languages are supported:
English to/from Arabic
English to/from Chinese (Simplified or Traditional)
I'm not sure if I'd call Cucumis a Web 2.0 site; nevertheless, it's yet another site featuring luscious-looking fruit in its logo! I read about Cucumis at TechCrunch today, and I have to say, I disagree with Michael Arrington a bit on this one. What he sees as a weakness of Cucumis, I see as its most appealing (and distinguishing) feature - the fact that the service is available only to those who are willing to give back to the community by offering translations of their own.
I see Michael's point that this framework certainly isn't going to make Cucumis any big money - but if they're able to run the site on donations alone, I say more power to 'em. It seems like the linguistic equivalent of many peer-to-peer file sharing networks out there: you can't be a freeloader. Share and share alike.
Of course, this is further complicated by the fact that in the U.S., at least, we are sadly lacking in foreign-language skills. But hey, maybe this'll motivate some people to learn more Spanish than just "cerveza grande."
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.
A company called
AvMedia has released an open-source translating proxy for Yahoo!
Messenger. It does translation between English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese using Google's web
translation services. Considering the state of machine (or at least Google) translation, this is bound to cause all
sorts of comical misunderstandings.
Google 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.
The beauty of the web is that your personal homepage could have an international audience. Of course, visitors from Russia, Korea, or Japan might have a hard time reading your English-only website.
