Google Translate Blog

Say hello (or olá or halo or salam) to automatic message translation in Gmail

2012-05-01T10:22:00.001-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Gmail Blog)

We're excited to announce three Gmail Labs graduations today: Automatic Message Translation, Smart Mute and Title Tweaks.

Automatic Message Translation
Did you ever dream about a future where your communications device could transcend language with ease? Well, that day is a lot closer. Back when we launched automatic message translation in Gmail Labs, we were curious to see how people would use it.

We heard immediately from Google Apps for Business users that this was a killer feature for working with local teams across the world. Some people just wanted to easily read newsletters from abroad. Another person wrote in telling us how he set up his mom’s Gmail to translate everything into her native language, thus saving countless explanatory phone calls (he thanked us profusely). I continue to use it to participate in discussions with the global Google offices I often visit.

Since message translation was one of the most popular labs, we decided it was time to graduate from Gmail Labs and move into the real world. Over the next few days, everyone who uses Gmail will be getting the convenience of translation added to their email. The next time you receive a message in a language other than your own, just click on Translate message in the header at the top of the message,

and it will be instantly translated into your language:

If you're bi-lingual and don't need translation for that language, just click on Turn off for: [language]. Or if you'd like to automatically have messages in that language translated into your language, click Always Translate. If you accidentally turned off the message translation feature for a particular language, or don't see the Translate message header on a message, click on the down arrow next to Reply at the top-right of the message pane and select the Translate message option in the drop-down.

Title Tweaks
With the graduation of Title Tweaks, we've changed the text in the browser tab so that you can more easily see if you have new messages. The tab now reads "Inbox (20) - user@example.com - Gmail" instead of "Gmail - Inbox (20) - user@example.com.”

Smart Mute We've made improvements to muting based on the graduation of the Smart Mute lab so you can be sure that noisy email threads stay out of your inbox. You can learn more about muting email threads in the help center.

In addition to graduating these three labs, we'll also be retiring some less popular labs over the next few days: Old Snakey, Mail Goggles, Mouse Gestures, Hide Unread Counts, Move Icon Column, Inbox Preview, Custom Date Formats and SMS in Chat gadget. Please note that the SMS in Chat lab is not being retired, just the gadget associated with it.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate

Breaking down the language barrier—six years in

2012-04-26T11:01:00.001-07:00

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.

The rise of the web has brought the world’s collective knowledge to the fingertips of more than two billion people. With just a short query you can access a webpage on a server thousands of miles away in a different country, or read a note from someone halfway around the world. But what happens if it’s in Hindi or Afrikaans or Icelandic, and you speak only English—or vice versa?

In 2001, Google started providing a service that could translate eight languages to and from English. It used what was then state-of-the-art commercial machine translation (MT), but the translation quality wasn’t very good, and it didn’t improve much in those first few years. In 2003, a few Google engineers decided to ramp up the translation quality and tackle more languages. That's when I got involved. I was working as a researcher on DARPA projects looking at a new approach to machine translation—learning from data—which held the promise of much better translation quality. I got a phone call from those Googlers who convinced me (I was skeptical!) that this data-driven approach might work at Google scale.

I joined Google, and we started to retool our translation system toward competing in the NIST Machine Translation Evaluation, a “bake-off” among research institutions and companies to build better machine translation. Google’s massive computing infrastructure and ability to crunch vast sets of web data gave us strong results. This was a major turning point: it underscored how effective the data-driven approach could be.

But at that time our system was too slow to run as a practical service—it took us 40 hours and 1,000 machines to translate 1,000 sentences. So we focused on speed, and a year later our system could translate a sentence in under a second, and with better quality. In early 2006, we rolled out our first languages: Chinese, then Arabic.

We announced our statistical MT approach on April 28, 2006, and in the six years since then we’ve focused primarily on core translation quality and language coverage. We can now translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish, even Esperanto.

Today we have more than 200 million monthly active users on translate.google.com (and even more in other places where you can use Translate, such as Chrome, mobile apps, YouTube, etc.). People also seem eager to access Google Translate on the go (the language barrier is never more acute than when you’re traveling)—we’ve seen our mobile traffic more than quadruple year over year. And our users are truly global: more than 92 percent of our traffic comes from outside the United States.

In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in 1 million books. To put it another way: what all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day. By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate. (We can’t speak for the galaxy; Douglas Adams’s “Babel fish” probably has us beat there.) Of course, for nuanced or mission-critical translations, nothing beats a human translator—and we believe that as machine translation encourages people to speak their own languages more and carry on more global conversations, translation experts will be more crucial than ever.

We imagine a future where anyone in the world can consume and share any information, no matter what language it’s in, and no matter where it pops up. We already provide translation for webpages on the fly as you browse in Chrome, text in mobile photos, YouTube video captions, and speech-to-speech “conversation mode” on smartphones. We want to knock down the language barrier wherever it trips people up, and we can’t wait to see what the next six years will bring.

Posted by Franz Och, Distinguished Research Scientist, Google Translate

Localize your apps and content more easily -- new formats in Translator Toolkit

2012-03-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

At Google, we put a lot of energy into helping localize the world’s information to make it more useful to more people. It’s not just about localizing our own products -- we want to provide tools that make it easy for translators and developers around the world to localize their own apps and content. Google Translator Toolkit is our online translation tool for amateur and professional translators -- it’s built on Google Translate and supports more than 100,000 language pairs.

This week, the Translator Toolkit team has launched support for four new translation-related file formats:

Android Resource (.xml)
Application Resource Bundle (.arb)
Chrome Extension (.json)
GNU gettext-based (.po)

With these new file formats, you can use Translator Toolkit to localize your apps and other products and content much more quickly and easily.

For example, to translate your Android application, go into the res/values directory and upload strings.xml into Translator Toolkit -- Translator Toolkit will now automatically translate it. You can then share your translations with amateur or professional translators, who can localize the text using Translator Toolkit’s WYSIWYG online editor.

When you’re finished, you can export your translated application and store it in a locale-specific directory in Android. Voilà -- easy localization! 翻译起来太方便了!

In addition, we’ve made the Translator Toolkit interface more intuitive for these new file formats so users can translate faster and more accurately. For example, you can turn on ‘Customized colors’ so translators can annotate the edited segments, ‘Number of characters in the segment’ to make sure the text doesn’t run too long (very important for mobile devices), and ‘Synchronized scrolling’ so you can scroll the original and translated text at the same time, which makes navigation much easier.

With these new file formats and UI features, along with the file formats we already support (.aea, .srt, .html), we hope Translator Toolkit can help you reach more users around the world.

When you’re ready, give Google Translator Toolkit a try and suggest any improvements you’d like to see so we can work on making it even better.

Posted by Chris Yang, Product Manager, and Haidong Shao, Software Engineer, Translator Toolkit

Using labels in Translator Toolkit

2012-03-28T14:57:00.003-07:00

Google Translator Toolkit, an online translation tool built on Google Translate, greatly simplifies the translation workflow through its WYSIWYG editor, real-time collaboration and translation management system in the cloud. As amateur translators, we often use Translator Toolkit for projects like translating Wikipedia articles or editing subtitle files for YouTube videos. However, as we work on more and more projects at once, we’ve found we want more powerful ways to organize our Translator Toolkit documents.

So we’re adding labels in Translator Toolkit. We’ve updated them this week, and we thought you’d enjoy a peek at the method to our madness.

With labels, you can organize your Translator Toolkit documents into any categories you define yourself -- ‘high priority,’ ‘wikipedia,’ ‘work,’ ‘later,’ etc. -- and in any combination (the beauty of labels is that they can overlap, so one document might be both ‘work’ and ‘high priority’).

To put a label on a Translator Toolkit document, just select the file and then click ‘Label’ to apply an existing label (or labels). You can also create a new label.

To access all the documents with a given label (or labels), navigate to ‘My labels’ on the left side and choose the labels you’re interested in.

Labels are just one way to make it easier to access and organize your Translator Toolkit documents. Hopefully these changes help you manage more complex projects -- please let us know if you have any feedback.

Posted by Chenjun Wu, Software Engineer, and Chris Yang, Product Manager, Translator Toolkit

Translating patents with the European Patent Office

2012-02-29T10:28:00.003-08:00

Last March, we signed an agreement with the European Patent Office (EPO) to break down linguistic barriers and improve the machine translation of patents. Today, we’ve released an update to our Google Translate system that incorporates the EPO’s parallel patent texts and allows translation between English and French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish.

This improved system is now part of the EPO’s Espacenet service, and goes under the name Patent Translate. Espacenet provides free access to millions of patent documents worldwide - and its users can use Patent Translate to read patents from around the world in their own language. Here’s a video that shows how it works:

Using the EPO’s parallel texts, we’ve been able to improve our ability to translate patents, as the following examples show:

Polymerisable ink

Source: une tête d'impression pour diriger une encre polymérisable par rayonnement vers un substrat reçu sur le support
Old translation: a print head to direct a radiation curable ink to a substrate on the support received
New translation: a print head for directing radiation polymerisable ink to a substrate received on the support

Ultrasonic vibration

Source: The crystals supply the required ultrasonic vibration needed to drive both the horn and the attached cutting tip during phacoemulsification and are controlled by the console.
Old translation: I cristalli di fornire la vibrazione necessaria ad ultrasuoni necessari per guidare sia il corno e la punta di sezionamento annesso durante facoemulsificazione e sono controllati dalla console.
New translation: I cristalli forniscono la vibrazione ultrasonica richiesta necessaria per pilotare sia il corno e la punta da taglio allegata durante la facoemulsificazione e sono controllati dalla console.

We share a similar vision to the EPO, that machine translation can help to overcome language barriers - and help to make the information contained in patents universally accessible and useful. While the improved system is pretty good, machine translation is a challenging computer science problem and does not always deliver perfect results. But it can be a very useful way for people to search and read patents that aren’t written in their language.

We’re excited to continue our collaboration with the EPO. We look forward to adding more languages - and showing how this public-private partnership will further improve access to patents for people around the world.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate

An easier way to type in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Hebrew

2012-02-27T10:30:00.008-08:00

Knowing what you want to translate is sometimes only half the battle. You may have a letter from your secret admirer sitting in front of you, but if you can’t type the words into Google Translate the meaning can remain elusive.

Typing in languages which use different character sets can be a frustrating problem in computer labs, internet cafés, and sometimes even on home computers if standard Latin alphabet keyboards are the only option available.

To make typing in these languages easier we began including virtual keyboards and transliteration input methods in Google Translate last year, and we’ve been working to expand that support over time. Today we’re happy to announce three major additions to our input methods: Japanese, Vietnamese, and Hebrew language support.

To use transliteration input methods, just select the ‘Allow phonetic typing’ option when typing in Google Translate.
Since releasing transliteration support for these languages a few days ago, we’ve noticed significant improvements in the the speed of input (for instance, Vietnamese text input has become 20% faster with the new input method) which we hope to see translate into a better experience for everyone.

Keep an eye out over the next few months as we add support for more languages.

Would you like to use Google’s transliteration input methods or virtual keyboards across the whole web? Try out our Chrome extension, which includes transliteration for over 20 languages and virtual keyboards for 70 more.

Posted by C. Andrew Warren, Associate Product Manager, Internationalization Team

Tutmonda helplingvo por ĉiuj homoj

2012-02-22T13:35:00.002-08:00

Today, we are adding Esperanto to Google Translate, making it our 64th supported language.

Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof started his quest for an easy-to-learn language shared by all people in the 1870s and first published the ideas in 1887 with his book Unua Libro. The concept of a common language spread quickly, and initial reactions to Esperanto have ranged from suppression to enthusiastic embrace. Now, 125 years later, Esperanto has hundreds of thousands of active speakers, millions of people with some knowledge of the language, and even a few hundred people who learned it from birth, taught by their parents.

Esperanto and Google Translate share the goal of helping people understand each other, this connection has been made even in this blog post. Therefore, we are very excited that we can now offer translation for this language as well.

The Google Translate team was actually surprised about the high quality of machine translation for Esperanto. As we know from many experiments, more training data (which in our case means more existing translations) tends to yield better translations. For Esperanto, the number of existing translations is comparatively small. German or Spanish, for example, have more than 100 times the data; other languages on which we focus our research efforts have similar amounts of data as Esperanto but don’t achieve comparable quality yet. Esperanto was constructed such that it is easy to learn for humans, and this seems to help automatic translation as well.

Although the system is still far from perfect, we hope that our latest addition helps you to learn more about Esperanto’s history and culture. Translation to and from Esperanto will soon be available on translate.google.com, in our mobile web app, and in the Google Translate app for Android and iOS.

Posted by Thorsten Brants, Research Scientist, Google Translate

Sometimes it’s easier just to write it

2012-01-04T15:32:00.001-08:00

With our most recent update to Google Translate for Android, we’ve added an experimental new input feature: handwriting on your touchscreen.

Maybe you’d like to see if three 木 make a 森, but you don’t have a Japanese keyboard installed? Just use the handwriting icon

Our goal is to break down the language barrier, all the time, everywhere. By adding handwriting input directly into our Android app we hope to help you get translation done even more quickly and easily. Sometimes you don’t know how to say what you want translated, sometimes you can’t type it, and sometimes it’s easier just to write it. We think of handwriting on the touchscreen as another natural input that you may want to use to complement the keyboard, microphone, or camera.

This is still an experimental feature. It’s available in Chinese and Japanese, and you can enable it for English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish if you like. (We currently only support single-character input for Chinese and Japanese.) Just as with speech recognition and our translations themselves, our handwriting recognition happens in the cloud, allowing us to continually improve accuracy without requiring you to download new versions of the app.

Download Google Translate in Android Market — it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 1.5 and up. Then, you can easily find out whether 自 really means ‘server rack with a Wi-Fi antenna’.

Posted by Daniel Keysers, Software Engineer

Translate more Indic languages with the updated Google Translate for iPhone app

2011-11-03T17:15:00.001-07:00

Back in June, we launched five new experimental Indic languages for Google Translate on the desktop and mobile web app. Today, we’ve updated the Google Translate for iPhone app to add these new alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. This brings the total number of languages supported by the app to 63 languages.

The updated app supports the ability to view dictionary results for single words and to display romanizations for these new Indic languages. So even if you can't read the script the words are written in, you can still take a shot at reading the translation.

Since these are still experimental alpha languages, you can expect translations be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese—which have much more parallel data to power our statistical machine translation approach. Despite these challenges, we believe users will find these new languages helpful and we're excited to be making them available through the Translate app.

Google Translate for iPhone now supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them. Get the latest version of the Google Translate for iPhone app from the App Store now and start breaking down language barriers wherever you are!

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate

Breaking down language barriers with translated English-language results

2011-10-25T11:02:00.001-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Inside Search Blog)

English speakers take it for granted that they can always find answers online, regardless of their search topic. But what if you speak Hindi, Welsh or Afrikaans? The amount of content available online per speaker for Hindi is just 1% of the vast content out there on the web per English speaker. So if you speak one of the languages with less online content, some of the most relevant results for your search may actually be in English.

To help break down that language barrier between you and the answers you need, starting today you may see relevant results in English in addition to those in your default language. For example, let’s say you speak Hindi and want to find information on mountain climbing -- we want to help you also find the relevant pages in English and for these, you’ll also see a translation into your language.

Language is one of the biggest barriers to making information universally accessible, and we’ve been working to make increasing use of machine translation to improve search across languages. This is especially important for languages with less prevalent local language content available online. You should also get the most relevant information regardless of the language you’re searching in. We use machine translation to translate your search, find the pages that best answer your question and translate the relevant results for you.

You’ll start to see relevant English-language pages when you’re searching in one of 14 languages: Afrikaans, Malay, Swahili, Serbian, Slovak, Macedonian, Slovenian, Norwegian, Hindi, Catalan, Maltese, Icelandic, Welsh and Albanian. If you click on the main result title, you’ll get to the original English-language page, while the translated link underneath will take you to a translated page. We hope this will help you find the information you need, no matter what language it’s in.

Posted by Jordan Gilliland, Software Engineer - Cross Language Search Team

Bringing relevant news to you, regardless of language -- translated news

2011-10-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

To help bridge language barriers between you and the news of interest to you from around the world -- and to bring you more diverse perspectives on foreign events -- we’ve added a new “translate” button to the expandable story boxes in the U.S. English edition of Google News.

Clicking the translate button reveals the English translation of the original headline using Google Translate. Clicking on the headline takes you to the publisher’s website where you can choose to use Google Translate to see an English version of the entire article. Headlines are labeled with their country of origin.

To do this, we look for foreign articles from local sources on a relevant news topic. For example, in the case of the flood in Thailand, in addition to surfacing English articles from international press like New York Times, we might show a related article from a local source like อาร์วายที9.

At the same time, we hope readers will benefit from finding relevant news in other languages and being able to read it without knowing the language.

Posted by Yaroslav Kurovtsev, Software Engineer, Google Translate

Start the conversation with Google Translate for Android

2011-10-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

(Cross posted on the Official Google Blog and Google Mobile Blog)

Mobile technology and the web have made it easier for people around the world to access information and communicate with each other. But there’s still a daunting obstacle: the language barrier. We’re trying to knock down that barrier so everyone can communicate and connect more easily.

Earlier this year, we launched an update to Google Translate for Android with an experimental feature called Conversation Mode, which enables you to you translate speech back and forth between languages. We began with just English and Spanish, but today we’re expanding to 14 languages, adding Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.

To use Conversation Mode, speak into your phone’s microphone, and the Translate app will translate what you’ve said and read the translation out loud. The person you’re speaking with can then reply in their language, and Conversation Mode will translate what they said and read it back to you.

This technology is still in alpha, so factors like background noise and regional accents may affect accuracy. But since it depends on examples to learn, the quality will improve as people use it more. We wanted to get this early version out to help start the conversation no matter where you are in the world.

We’ve also added some other features to make it easier to speak and read as you translate. For example, if you wanted to say “Where is the train?” but Google Translate recognizes your speech as “Where is the rain?”, you can now correct the text before you translate it. You can also add unrecognized words to your personal dictionary.

When viewing written translation results, you can tap the magnifying glass icon to view the translated text in full screen mode so you can easily show it to someone nearby, or just pinch to zoom in for a close-up view.

Tap the magnifying glass icon to view translations full screen.

Finally, we’ve also optimized the app for larger screens like your Android tablet.

While we work to expand full Conversation Mode to even more languages, Google Translate for Android still supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them.

Download the Google Translate app in Android Market — it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 2.2 and up.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager

Google Translate for Google+

2011-08-29T16:39:00.000-07:00

We've heard from a lot of Google+ users wanting an easier way to understand posts written in other languages, so we thought we should do something about that.

We just introduced on Google+, a new Chrome extension, Google Translate for Google+, that uses the power of Google Translate to automatically translate any post or comment into more than 50 languages.

Once you've installed the extension, refresh Google+ and you'll see Translate links next to posts and comments. Click the links to instantly see translations.

You can get the extension from the Chrome Web Store here:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jfppgkomfopklagggkjiaddgndkgopgl

Note: This extension is currently experimental as we figure out the best way to integrate translation into the Google+ community. So please give us your feedback in the comments, or by clicking the “Send Feedback” button on Google+.

Posted by Josh Estelle, Senior Software Engineer

Paid version of Google Translate API now open for business

2011-08-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Google Code Blog)

Back in May, we announced the deprecation of the free Translate API v1. Today, we’re introducing a paid version of the Google Translate API for businesses and commercial software developers. The Google Translate API provides a programmatic interface to access Google’s latest machine translation technology. This API supports translations between 50+ languages (more than 2500 language pairs) and is made possible by Google’s cloud infrastructure and large scale machine learning algorithms.

The paid version of Translate API removes many of the usage restrictions of previous versions and can now be used in commercial products. Translation costs $20 per million (M) characters of text translated (or approximately $0.05/page, assuming 500 words/page). You can sign up online via the APIs console for usage up to 50 M chars/month.

Developers who created projects in the APIs Console and started using the Translate API v2 prior to today will continue to receive a courtesy limit of 100K chars/day until December 1, 2011 or until they enable billing for their projects.

For academic users, we will continue to offer free access to the Google Translate Research API through our University Research Program for Google Translate. For website translations, we encourage you to use the Google Website Translator gadget which will continue to be free for use on all web sites. In addition, Google Translate, Translator Toolkit, the mobile translate apps for iPhone and Android, and translation features within Chrome, Gmail, etc. will continue to be available to all users at no charge.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager

Messages for Japan at Tanabata in Sendai

2011-08-15T15:55:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

A month after this spring’s devastating earthquake in Japan, we created a site where people from around the world could submit messages of hope in their own languages and have them automatically translated into Japanese. From Paris to Dubai to Manila, nearly 30,000 messages have been posted through messagesforjapan.com.

This past weekend marked the celebration of Tanabata in Sendai, the largest city in the disaster area and home to one of the most famous festivals in the country. People often celebrate Tanabata, which means "Evening of the Seventh,” by writing wishes on tanzaku (small strips of paper) and hanging them on bamboo branches. This year, these paper strips displayed some of the messages of hope submitted through the site, and festival participants added their own messages to those from around the world.

We’ve updated messagesforjapan.com so you can see photos of people gathering for Tanabata in Sendai—reading, creating and hanging messages in the area surrounding the disaster earlier this year.

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager

Google Translate welcomes you to the Indic web

2011-06-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog and on the Research Blog)

Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google Translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. In India and Bangladesh alone, more than 500 million people speak these five languages. Since 2009, we’ve launched a total of 11 alpha languages, bringing the current number of languages supported by Google Translate to 63.

Indic languages differ from English in many ways, presenting several exciting challenges when developing their respective translation systems. Indian languages often use the Subject Object Verb (SOV) ordering to form sentences, unlike English, which uses Subject Verb Object (SVO) ordering. This difference in sentence structure makes it harder to produce fluent translations; the more words that need to be reordered, the more chance there is to make mistakes when moving them. Tamil, Telugu and Kannada are also highly agglutinative, meaning a single word often includes affixes that represent additional meaning, like tense or number. Fortunately, our research to improve Japanese (an SOV language) translation helped us with the word order challenge, while our work translating languages like German, Turkish and Russian provided insight into the agglutination problem.

You can expect translations for these new alpha languages to be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese—which have much more of the web content that powers our statistical machine translation approach. Despite these challenges, we release alpha languages when we believe that they help people better access the multilingual web. If you notice incorrect or missing translations for any of our languages, please correct us; we enjoy learning from our mistakes and your feedback helps us graduate new languages from alpha status. If you’re a translator, you’ll also be able to take advantage of our machine translated output when using the Google Translator Toolkit.

Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we’ve enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards. For example, if you type in the word “nandri,” it will generate the Tamil word நன்றி (see what it means). To see all these beautiful scripts in action, you’ll need to install fonts* for each language.

We hope that the launch of these new alpha languages will help you better understand the Indic web and encourage the publication of new content in Indic languages, taking us five alpha steps closer to a web without language barriers.

*Download the fonts for each language: Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati and Kannada.

Posted by Ashish Venugopal, Research Scientist

Define, translate and search for words in Google eBooks

2011-05-24T15:55:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Google Books Blog)

When bookworms stumble across a word we don't know, we face the classic dilemma of whether to put the book down to look up the word or forge ahead in ignorance to avoid interrupting the reading experience. Well, fret no more, readers, because today you can select words in Google eBooks and look up their definitions, translate them or search for them elsewhere in the book from within the Google eBooks Web Reader—without losing your page or even looking away.

The Web Reader works in all modern browsers and lets you read Google eBooks without having to download them. To select text in a Google eBook within the Web Reader, double-click or highlight it with your mouse and a pop-up menu opens with the following options: Define, Translate, Search Book, Search Google and Search Wikipedia. (Note: these features work in "Flowing text" mode, not "Scanned pages" mode. Switch to "Flowing text" in the Web Reader by clicking on the Settings menu labeled "Aa" and select it under the "Show" drop-down menu. Not all Google eBooks are available in "Flowing text.")

Define
Click “Define” and the pop-up now displays a definition of the word via Google Dictionary, without leaving the page you’re on in the Google eBook. Click on the audio icon to the left of the word you want defined to hear the definition pronounced aloud. If you decide you do want to leave the page, select “More” to go to the Google Dictionary page for the word, which provides additional information like usage examples and web definitions.

Translate
You can also translate a single word or several sentences of content into dozens of languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, by selecting the "Translate" option. As with definitions, you'll see the translated text displayed in the pop-up window.

Search
By selecting one of the search options, you can search for the selected text in other places within the ebook itself or across the entire web.

“Search Book” brings up all the instances in which the selected text appears in the ebook. You can also access the search options by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the upper right-hand corner of the Web Reader. Click on a search result to jump to that section.

“Search Google” and “Search Wikipedia” open up a new browser tab displaying the search results for that text on Google and Wikipedia, respectively.

Go ahead and give these new features a spin by reading a Google eBook.

Update 5:58 p.m.: Included details about "Flowing text" vs. "Scanned pages."

Posted by Derek Lei, Software Engineer, Google Books

Google Translate: the remix

2011-05-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted on The Official Google blog)

When we built Google Translate we thought it was a cool tool, but we have to admit we had fairly straightforward ideas about what it would be useful for (lowering language barriers and making more web content available to people around the world). As with many inventions, though, it turns out people have found uses for the tool that we never imagined. Recently, two clever Translate trends caught our eye—perhaps one of them will inspire you to come up with a fun Translate trick of your own.

First, some creative folks translated strings of consonants into German to create a new beatboxing tool. The phrase “pv zk bschk” didn’t initially make much sense to us, but a quick listen got us nodding our heads along to the beat.

Now it seems there’s a similar trend in Taiwan: using the spoken output of Google Translate as the vocals for self-composed songs or video spoofs. Recently, a video called “Google Translate Song” ratcheted up over half a million views and became one of the most popular YouTube videos in Taiwan this month.

Whether you’re laying down your next track, ordering take-out or communing with animals, we hope you’re having as much fun using Translate as we have building it.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate

Everybody’s talking (and translating) with Chrome

2011-04-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted on the Google Chrome Blog)

Today, we’re excited to make a nifty feature widely available in today’s new Chrome stable release: speech input through HTML.

Curious about how speech input can be used in real life? Here’s one example: Using Chrome, you can now translate what you say into other languages with Google Translate. If you’re translating from English, just click on the microphone on the bottom right of the input box, speak your text, and choose the language you want to translate to. In fact, you can even click on the “Listen” feature to hear the translated words spoken back to you!

Speech input through HTML is one of many new web technologies in the browser that help make innovative and useful web applications like Google Translate’s speech feature possible. If you’d like to check out more examples of applications built using the latest and greatest web technologies in the browser, you can check out more than 200 submissions by web developers on chromeexperiments.com. If you’re not already using Chrome, don’t forget to first download Chrome at google.com/chrome.

Posted by Josh Estelle, Software Engineer

Listen to more languages in Google Translate for Android

2011-04-14T15:16:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted on the Google Mobile blog)

Today we launched an update to Google Translate for Android that allows you to listen to translations in several more languages.

We’ve dramatically improved the quality of our spoken translations in over 15 languages, including Russian, Chinese and Portuguese, and added the ability to listen to three new languages: Japanese, Arabic and Korean. Text-to-speech is one of the most popular features of this mobile interface. Whether you’re learning how to say a foreign phrase, or trying to share information with someone in their language, simply tap the Speaker icon after doing a translation and you’ll hear the difference.

With today’s launch, Google Translate for Android supports translation between 58 languages and can speak translations in 24 languages. The application works on phones and tablets running Android 2.1 and above. To download Google Translate for Android, scan the QR code below, or visit us on the Android Market.

Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager

Introducing the Google Translate app for iPhone

2011-02-08T11:59:00.000-08:00

Back in August 2008, we launched a Google Translate HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today, the official Google Translate for iPhone app is available for download from the App Store. The new app has all of the features of the web app, plus some significant new additions designed to improve your overall translation experience.

Speak to translate
The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and—just like the web app—you can translate a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to translate.

Listen to your translations
You can also listen to your translations spoken out loud in one of 23 different languages. This feature uses the same new speech synthesizer voices as the desktop version of Google Translate we introduced last month.

Full-screen mode
Another feature that might come in handy is the ability to easily enlarge the translated text to full-screen size. This way, it’s much easier to read the text on the screen, or show the translation to the person you are communicating with. Just tap on the zoom icon to quickly zoom in.

And the app also includes all of the major features of the web app, including the ability to view dictionary results for single words, access your starred translations and translation history even when offline, and support romanized text like Pinyin and Romaji.

You can download Google Translate now from the App Store globally. The app is available in all iOS supported languages, but you’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch iOS version 3 or later.

Posted by Wenzhang Zhu, Software Engineer

A new look for Google Translate for Android

2011-01-12T11:08:00.001-08:00

When we launched the first version of Google Translate for Android in January 2010, we were excited about the year ahead. For the first time, we were bringing the capabilities supported on Google Translate—like machine translation, romanization of non-Roman scripts and spoken translations—to the Android platform. We also offered voice input to let you speak the word or phrase you wanted to translate instead of typing it in, and SMS translation so you could translate SMS messages sent to you in foreign languages.

Today, we’re refreshing Translate for Android with several updates to make the app easier to interact with. Among other improvements, we’ve created better dropdown boxes to help select the languages you want to translate from and into, an improved input box, and cleaner icons and layout.

We also want to let you in on an experimental feature that’s still in its earliest stages—Conversation Mode. This is a new interface within Google Translate that’s optimized to allow you to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language. You may have seen an early demo a few months ago, and today you can try it yourself on your Android device.

Currently, you can only use Conversation Mode when translating between English and Spanish. In conversation mode, simply press the microphone for your language and start speaking. Google Translate will translate your speech and read the translation out loud. Your conversation partner can then respond in their language, and you’ll hear the translation spoken back to you. Because this technology is still in alpha, factors like regional accents, background noise or rapid speech may make it difficult to understand what you’re saying. Even with these caveats, we’re excited about the future promise of this technology to be able to help people connect across languages.

As Android devices have spread across the globe, we’ve seen Translate for Android used all over. The majority of our usage now comes from outside the United States, and we’ve seen daily usage from more than 150 countries, from Malaysia to Mexico to Mozambique. It’s really rewarding for us to see how this new platform is helping us break down language barriers the world over.

Translate supports 53 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and voice input for 15 languages. You can download the application, available for devices running Android 2.1 and above, by searching for “Google Translate” in Android Market or by scanning the QR Code below.

Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager

Listen to us now!

2010-12-16T16:06:00.002-08:00

One of the features of Google Translate that users enjoy the most is the ability to listen to the text they have just translated in audio form. To play an audio version of the translated text we use a speech synthesizer, a computer algorithm that converts text to speech. Today, we have launched new speech synthesizer voices.

The new voices are available in three new languages — Arabic, Japanese, and Korean — and provide dramatic quality improvements for 17 other languages: Czech, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

So go ahead. Visit Google Translate and try a sentence or two. We hope you like our new voices. And for the beatboxing fans who used our old German voice: give it a try — it may still work... Have fun!

Posted by Alex Salcianu, Software Engineer

When one translation just isn’t enough

2010-12-15T14:09:00.000-08:00

When you come to Google Translate, we always do our best to give you the most accurate translation our system can produce. However, sometimes translation can be pretty tough. Language is full of ambiguities and our system has to do its best to make the right choices. So why choose?

We’ve launched a new feature to provide you with alternate translations for each phrase in the translated text. Just click the translated phrase and you’ll see a pop-up menu of possible alternates for that phrase, as well as the original phrase highlighted in your original text. Not only can these alternative translations give you a better understanding of a confusing translation, but they also allow you to help Google choose the best alternative when we make a mistake.

This new feature is powered by harnessing the vast knowledge within our statistical machine translation system. Typically, when we produce a translation, our system searches through millions of possible translations, selecting the best -- that is, the most statistically likely -- translation. With this feature, we expose more of those possible alternatives. For more information about how our system works, check out http://translate.google.com/about/.

By using this feature, you can help improve Google Translate. Selecting phrase-level alternatives gives us feedback that fits well within the our system’s statistical models. We hope to incorporate this structured feedback into our system, improving translation quality over time.

We hope this makes our translations even more useful to you, and allows you to help us help you find the best translation possible!

Posted by Josh Estelle, Senior Software Engineer

On-screen Keyboards on Google Translate

2010-12-14T12:07:00.001-08:00

Today Google Translate supports translation between almost sixty languages, but typing many of those on a standard QWERTY keyboard ranges from difficult to impossible. That’s why today we’re happy to announce the addition of on-screen keyboards to Google Translate. Whether you’re a native Georgian (ქართული ენა) speaker travelling abroad, or a student learning German with no way to type those tricky umlauts (ü), we hope this new feature will come to your rescue.

You’ll notice a small keyboard icon in the bottom corner of the text input box. Click this to open a virtual keyboard for the selected input language. You can either click the letters on the on-screen keyboard, or type using your real keyboard while the on-screen keyboard is visible.

Some languages such as Vietnamese and Armenian have more than one popular layout for local keyboards. Our on-screen keyboards support multiple layouts too, and you can switch between these layouts by clicking on the arrows at the top of the on-screen keyboard

To close the on-screen keyboard, simple click the small keyboard icon again.

With this launch, we’ve added on-screen keyboards for these languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish.

Some of you may be familiar with our “Phonetic typing” feature - for a few languages such as Arabic, you can type a word as it would sound in English (e.g. “marhaban”), and see the letters transformed to Arabic (e.g. مرحبا) before being translated. The new on-screen keyboards do not interfere with phonetic typing for languages that support both – when the keyboard is open, phonetic typing will be disabled.

We hope that this latest addition to Google Translate will make writing and communicating in foreign languages even easier. Please let us know if you have any feedback in our discussion group.

Posted by Frank Yung-Fong Tang, Senior Software Engineer