Google is making a new move to lower language barriers, offering the ability to translate search results from one language to another.
The search giant is in the process of adding the feature to the "show options" button that shows at the top of search results page. "We've offered this feature in Google Translate for a while, but now we're integrating it fully into Google search, making it easier for you to find and read results from pages across the web, even if they weren't written in a language you speak," said Maureen Heymans, the project's technical leader, and Jeff Chin, its product manager, in a blog post.
Clicking the option can dramatically change the results you see. For example, my ordinary search for "Taipei Museum of Fine Art" produced mostly English-language results. The translated results, though, featured Chinese Web sites with a different perspective (see the result below). Among other things, there was a Chinese Wikipedia entry--also conveniently translated by Google when I clicked the link--where there is none written in English.
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You'll still have to figure out what all the accents mean, but Google now provides a phonetic spelling of translated words.
(Credit: Google)Google made several improvements to Google Translate Monday, such as the ability to translate words written with unique character sets with their phonetic spelling.
Google has been steadily adding languages to Google Translate over the last couple of years, but if the language used a completely unfamiliar character set--such as the Roman-character based languages like English or Spanish versus Chinese characters--the service was only useful for those trying to write in the language. Now Google Translate will help those trying to translate English into Chinese for speaking purposes by providing a phonetic version of the translation in Roman characters.
Those trying to translate English into Hebrew, Arabic, or Persian will have to wait for the phonetic option, but Google has also added a feature that lets an English (or any other language) speaker phonetically spell out a word in Arabic, Persian, or Hindi and get a translation of that word in its native character set. And for those trying to translate other languages into English, Google has added a link that produces an audio version of the word or phrase in English.
Google is offering Web publishers a free tool for providing translation services on their pages.
Lots of big companies based outside the U.S. offer English-language versions of their Web site with a click of a button, but Google's new service actually detects the home language of a visitor to your site and offers them a translated version of the page based on their browser settings. Fifty-one languages will be supported by the service, which Webmasters can offer by pasting a bit of code into their pages.
Such a service is only as useful as its accuracy, however. Google admitted the service is really designed to offer a "quick gist" of a page's content and hailed the work of professional translators on what is apparently International Translation Day. (Unbelievably, Hallmark does not appear to make a card commemorating this day.)
Interested publishers can test out the code here.
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)
Google continues to move language translation into more and more of its products. On Thursday, it became a feature of Google Docs, letting anyone do an on-the-spot translation into one of 42 languages.
The new feature, tucked away in a settings menu, has the smarts to automatically detect in which language the original document is written. It then opens the translated version in a new window, allowing you to compare and contrast the two side by side, more easily checking whether the translation has bungled any words or phrasing.
This new version can then either replace the original or be saved as a copy, though Google makes no visual indication in your document source list that its contents are in another language.
Over the last six months, Google has been quite busy adding translation to its other products, including its Gmail and Friend Connect services.
In Gmail's case, users can translate entire messages into one of Google Translate's supported languages; however, this feature must first be enabled in Gmail's Labs settings menu.
The translation implementation in Friend Connect is a little more interesting, as it's able to unify the language on any comment thread, regardless of how many languages in which the user comments are written.
Click to enlarge.
(Credit: CNET)
Translation is making its way into more Google services this month, having just been added to Gmail's labs. If you get a message in a different language, there's a new link that'll show up in the top of the message that lets you translate it to whatever language you have Gmail set to. You can also set it up to do the translation to any language of your choice.
It does the actual translation in just a few seconds, and gets both the subject and body while retaining the original. You can switch back to it by hitting the translate link again.
Once items have been translated they don't stay translated, which means you'll have to re-translate every time you're viewing that message again. The translated text is also not indexed into Gmail's search engine, which means you have to remember the word phrase in its original language to find it. Assuming you don't get too many e-mails in an alternate language this shouldn't be too much of a problem, though.
I anticipate having great fun with this in my spam folder, which is frequented by non-English grammar train wrecks. As with other Gmail labs items this must be turned on from the labs menu settings before you can use it.
Note: Changed the headline in light of the fact that Nigeria is an English speaking country. Thanks to those of you who pointed this out.
Recently: Google Friend Connect gets comment translation
Gmail users can now make use of translation right from their e-mails with a new Gmail labs add-on.
(Credit: CNET)
Google's Friend Connect just got a really neat new feature: comment translation. It can now unify the language of any comment thread, turning any and all comments into one language. This means that if you have one post in Mandarin, another in Spanish, and yet another in Russian, you can click an option to read them all in the same language.
Google is using its own Translate API to do the dirty work, which means whatever unintentionally bad translations it would do on the Translate site will happen on comment threads. Friend Connect users who already have the tool installed on their blogs or sites do not have to upgrade; Google is pushing out the new features with the same bit of code.
Here's a quick video on how it works:
Google has brought seven new languages to its Google Translate service. According to the company, Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Hungarian, Maltese, Thai, and Turkish have been added. The company also announced that its English dictionary has been improved to "include synonyms, antonyms, pronunciations, detailed definitions, and examples from Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary." All its new features are available now.
User Centric, a company that researches user experiences, announced Monday that it has concluded its usability study of Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. According to its findings, which took opinions from 30 participants who were asked to complete seven basic tasks on each site, users preferred Google Health over Microsoft HealthVault, even though both services were plagued with flaws. Participants claim Google Health is more usable thanks to better navigation and simpler data entry. Microsoft HealthVault received low marks from participants due to its overabundant use of medical terms the participants didn't understand.
TVtrip, a company that provides video reviews of hotels around the world, has secured approximately $9 million in venture funding, the company said Monday. Balderton Capital and Partech International led the round. The company, which claims it has over 9,800 video reviews on its site, will use the funding to expand its presence online.
Travel company, Travelzoo, acquired the Fly.com domain for $1.8 million The company is using the domain to launch a new travel itinerary search that it claims, will offer better travel options than it has in the past. The search is free and available now.
If you like Google's translate service but want something that can do the same phrase in multiple languages at once and in real time, the Nice Translator is worth checking out.
This simple application uses Google Translate to do the heavy lifting. It lets users type in any phrase, in any language, then translates it into one of the other 34 available languages as they type.
The site works fairly well on mobile devices, including the iPhone, though not as well as Google's own mobile-translation page despite its one-language-at-a-time limitation.
[via FriendFeed]
Translate the same phrase in multiple languages with Nice Translator.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Over the weekend, YouTube introduced a new feature to help make captioned or subtitled videos more accessible to international users. The new system uses machine translation to convert any of these videos into your language of choice in real time.
To access this feature, users simply need to turn it on from the lower-right corner of the player. From there, they can use a simple drop-down menu to pick which language into which they want the video translated. Unfortunately, YouTube won't remember a user's translation choices from one video to the next, but this seems like a feature that could be added down the line.
Set what language you want subtitled videos to play in with YouTube's new on-the-fly translate service.
(Credit: CNET Networks)What's impressive is how many languages the new system supports. It's using the same translation tools from Google Translate, so you've got 36 different languages from which to choose. Of course, all of this relies on the video source having captions in the first place; an overwhelming majority don't.
My dream, albeit just a dream, is to have YouTube use speech-to-text conversion on all its videos to make this an automatic process, since creating properly timed subtitles for long-form videos is a pain.
To give it a spin, try it on this video where you can see Robocop play Shogi (Japanese chess) with lasers.
