Oy! Google Translate now speaks Yiddish

Google on Monday announced that it had added nine new languages to its Translate service.

Included in the update (which actually went live early last week) are Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish. This brings the total number of languages the service is able to translate to 51.

Like other Google Translate updates, these changes will eventually go out to other services where the machine translation is used, including Google Friend Connect, Google Talk, Gmail, and most recently Google Docs. However, the new languages have not shown up on any of those services just yet.

In late June, Google pushed out an alpha version of Persian translating to meet the needs of increased activity around the Iranian presidential elections. The company continues to note that Persian translations, along with some of these latest additions, will not be as precise as translations to and from some more widely used languages; it will take time to get the quality up to the same level as its Spanish, German, and French translations, which were the first to be offered.

Finally, Google adds a way for people to convert one language into Yiddish.

(Credit: CNET)

[madeinttown]

"Finally, Google adds a way for people to convert one language into Yiddish, albeit in Hebrew."

huh? Yiddish *is* supposed to be written with the Hebrew alphabet...

[TechnoMan475392]

Yeah seriously.

Yiddish in itself is po-dunk German in Hebrew. Get your facts straight!

[Josh.Lowensohn]

Yes, I meant the English alphabet equivalent. Es tut mir bahng if that was unclear.

[lightningrob]

I'm verklemt!

[bigpicture]

I was to understand from something that I read about this Google Translate function, that it improved its accuracy from an algorithm that compared similar phrases in translated books, magazines, articles etc. So supposedly the more available materials on the web the more accurate the translation.

[tamarweinberg]

haha, I *love* the screenshot example. :D

[hershl]

As to Google's site: Sometimes, all it offers is a Yiddish (Hebrew) letter transcription of the Yiddish word. Often, the word-processing system employed treats subscript and superscript markings on certain letters as separate letters.

As to TechnoMan's comment above: English, too, might be defined as "podunk German" if the German dialect were the Middle High German that strongly influences BOTH languages. But I'm afraid TechnoMan's "facts" are more prejudices -- or outright hostility -- than philological science.

[poliglott]

I don't know about Yiddish but Google's translation system fails in quite a few languages. With few exceptions (mainly short sentences) It produces at best a pretty imperfect translation and at worst sheer gobbledegook.
Try it with French and German and see what you get.
I sent a colleague my message translated into Spanish and he wondered what I wanted to say.
I have been a fan of Google but as they say in Englsih: Shoemaker, stick to thy last.
Just for fun, see what Google Translation does with that. here are some hilarious outputs:

Shoemaker, bâton à ton dernier.
Schuster, bleib bei deinem letzten.
????, ????? ???????? ???? (shoiemaker, behind yours stay)
and no comments for the Farsi which I just don't know what it is saying:
???? ? ??? ?? ?? ?? ?????
One of my major grouses moreover is that Google uses us users to better its EBMT (Example Based Machine Translation (this is what I suppose the algorithm is) and the crowdsourcers are not even thanked for their help. Levering on someone's knowledge is not exactly "kosher" : "Do no evil".

[inachu1]

Very true Yiddish is to be with english characters.
Shows how cnet does it hiring practices.

[yiddishman]

You can learn Yiddish over the internet LIVE with teachers at http://eYiddish.org using distant learning methods . You will then understand how inaccurate is this automatic translator. With languages, there is no shortcuts! You need to learn with a good teacher, a textbook and a real dictionary ... and practice.