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Oct 27

Google Translate Introduces New Languages

This article was written on May 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

Google Translate has just introduced several new languages to their translation service. Adding to their already impressive list which has included difficult languages like Arabic and Chinese for quite some time, they now add to the list the following languages:

Bulgarian
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Finnish
Hindi
Norwegian
Polish
Swedish

Of course we know that the translations any automated service offers aren’t perfect, and in fact, sometimes they’re way “off.” What they do help with though, is getting the general idea of what is being said. We’ve been able to use Google Translate on several occasions to be able to read websites in other languages. Without a translation service, this would not be possible. Another problem with translation services is that a lot of words change depending on the context that they are used, in every language, and at this point translation services aren’t so good at determining context. Google’s service is impressive, just because there are so many languages that they offer, and in all there are 506 different translation combinations.

Google Blogoscoped also points out how the design has been changed a little. They say, “Instead of a single HTML combo box showing the available language pairs, you now get two DHTML combo boxes each containing a language for more free mixing of source and target languages.” In other words, now you pick your starting language and your ending language in separate boxes. There’s also a “detect language” option for when you’re wanting to translate a web page. For example, I decided that I wanted to translate CyberNet News, so I entered in the URL and told Google to detect the language of the page, and then translate it to Finnish. Google detected that it was English, and then had no problem translating it to Finnish.