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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An example of Brizzly's new tweet translation.
(Credit: Brizzly)Web-based Twitter client Brizzly made a dual announcement Friday: first, it's opened up into a full public beta mode (previously, an invite code was required); and second, it can now translate tweets into your default language on the site.
To translate a tweet in Brizzly--which already expands links, videos, and photos posted to Twitter, creating a more visual experience--you can click on a question mark for an instant translation. This is interesting, as Twitter has made its first moves recently in launching translated versions of the service (starting with Spanish), meaning that there will potentially be many more non-English tweets flowing through the system. It uses Google Translate, so needless to say, it's not totally perfect.
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.
So how do you say "fail whale" en español? Twitter has launched a Spanish translation, according to a blog post Tuesday (in Spanish) by co-founder Biz Stone.
It's the first of multiple volunteer-assisted translations for the microblogging site, the post explained. A look at Twitter's public timeline will show that it's used in many languages across the world, but until this point, the Twitter.com site has been English only. Now, users can go into their settings to translate it into Spanish.
This could be key as Twitter attempts to grow bigger overseas amid allegations that its traffic has plateaued. Facebook, for example, saw significant growth overseas when it started launching user-translated versions of its site.
To better inform the Twittering masses, we have gone to the trouble of plugging the term "fail whale" into Google Translate to see how you say it in Spanish. That didn't go too well with the algorithm, so we tried "whale of failure" and came out with "la ballena de fracaso." Unfortunately, that just doesn't have the same ring.
But this is not actually the first time that Twitter has toyed with launching a non-English edition. Last year, Twitter board member Joi Ito hyped up the launch of a standalone Twitter Japan site, powered by an investment from Ito's Digital Garage, that was notable because it was ad-supported (Twitter still hasn't rolled out ads or even said that it will for sure).
Biz Stone filled in CNET News on the status of Twitter Japan via e-mail on Tuesday night: "(It's) doing very well. A few of us were there a few weeks ago to launch a brand new mobile service. We had a really fun tweetup in Tokyo."
Twitter hasn't said what the next translations of its site will be, though presumably they'd pick a language that's already spoken by many users or one spoken in a region where it hopes to make big inroads. Or they could just be cutesy and launch in Klingon or Pirate.
This post was updated at 10:40 p.m. with comment from Biz Stone.
It's complicated.
So just how do you say "poke" in Latin? It's "puncti," according to Facebook's newest language translation. The supposedly "dead" language--O.K., so the Others on "Lost" speak it sometimes--debuted as an official translation on the social network on Friday.
"Latin has joined the more than 70 languages we've made available on the site in the past two years, including some which have launched just today--Azeri, Faroese, Georgian and Nepali," a post on the company blog by Facebook's Elizabeth Linder read. "Some of these are languages that millions of people speak across the globe. Others are dialects that specific communities use in select geographic areas. Still others are just for fun: 'Pirate' may not appeal to everyone, but for those nostalgic for the days of Blackbeard and Captain Hook, it's there for you."
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg notably studied both ancient Greek and Latin in high school; interviews have said that when he enrolled at Harvard, which he ended up dropping out of to run Facebook full-time, he considered studying classics rather than computer science.
Most of Facebook's translations have been "crowdsourced" by users. Latin was a volunteer effort, too, according to the blog post, which must have been quite the operation considering the likes of Cicero and Ovid probably didn't use the term "news feed" colloquially.
"To students of Latin, the availability of the language on Facebook may be just what's needed to narrow the distance between themselves and the venerable language," Linder's post wrote. "While students of 'living languages' practice on subtitled films and in conversation groups, on vacations and with exchange students, Latin scholars soak in rare living breaths of their studied language, satisfying themselves with the occasional legal phrase, nursery plant, benediction or school motto."
Conveniently, that ubiquitous Facebook term "status" is the same in English and in Latin.
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.
Facebook made a dual set of announcements this week pertaining to Facebook Connect, the universal-log-in product that it offers to third-party developers and Web sites. Both are aimed at making Connect more ubiquitous: first, a tool called "Translations for Facebook Connect" that simplifies the process of translating the product into international languages, and second, the "Facebook Connect Wizard" for incorporating the product into a site with little developer expertise required.
Facebook first announced that Connect would be available in a multilingual format this summer. Now, the tool can be used to translate any site into the language of a given user who's logged in with Connect.
Last we heard, about 15,000 sites had implemented Facebook Connect, a product that statistics firm Hitwise says gave the social network enough momentum to propel it past once-bigger rival MySpace in terms of U.S. traffic. Launching international translations of the main Facebook site--which the company ended up "crowdsourcing" to users starting early last year--is largely credited with kickstarting the social network's growth overseas.
Facebook now has over 300 million active users around the world, a sizable majority of which are outside the U.S.
Plugging in Facebook Connect information with the three-step 'wizard.'
(Credit: Facebook)"Establishing a presence on the social Web requires fundamental building blocks," a post by Facebook employee Alex Himel explained as it announced the Facebook Connect Wizard. "Facebook provides these essential tools, including identity for a great registration system, and immediate access to 300 million active global users. Facebook Connect gives entrepreneurs of all sizes--and with varying developer resources--the ability to build traffic efficiently through reaching a relevant audience, while offering an engaging user experience."
The new Connect Wizard takes only three steps, Himel's post said.
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)
Facebook announced Tuesday in a post on its developer blog that Facebook Connect--its universal-login product used by more than 15,000 third-party sites--is now available in an array of international languages.
"Developers who've implemented Facebook Connect, including those who have installed social widgets like the Fan Box, now have the ability to decide in which language they want their Facebook Connect features rendered," the post by Facebook's James Lezsczenski read. "When a user first connects to your site, or publishes something back to Facebook, the Facebook Connect content will appear in the language you specify. User-generated content continues to appear in the language in which it was written."
Facebook, which now has more than 250 million members around the world, began launching international translations of its site early last year, encouraging users to help translate the social-networking service into their native languages. This is when Facebook's growth around the world really started to speed up.
