A Google Translate Experiment Shows Definitions

Google Translate experiments with displaying definitions for the words you're translating. Jérémy Heleine noticed the new feature, which shows a list of definitions, synonyms, examples and related words and snippets. Google also suggests a related translation ("see also").

Definitions and synonyms are also displayed in Google Search, but they're useful in Google Translate too. In addition to using Google Translate as a dictionary, you could improve your translation by picking a better synonym, a context or a more appropriate expression. For example, instead of using "Hello", you could translate "Hi" or "Howdy" and you'll get different translations.

Google Search even lets you translate words when searching for definitions. Search for [define hello], expand the dictionary card and you'll see a section called "translation hello to". Another option is to search for [translate hello into french].

{ Thanks, Frédéric Pereira. }

Edit Translations to Improve Google Translate

Google Translate now lets you edit translations. Click the "Improve" icon below the translation, edit the text and click "Contribute". Google shows this message: "Your contribution will be used to improve translation quality and may be shown to users anonymously".

Until now, you could only click the words from the translations and pick one of the alternate translations offered by Google.

{ Thanks, Emanuele Bartolomucci. }

Definite Articles in Google Translate

This is pretty useful. When you translate a noun, Google Translate now shows the proper definite article. For example, when you translate "person" into Portuguese, Google displays multiple translations: "a pessoa", "o homem", "a mulher" and more. Google actually translates "the person".

When there are too many translations, Google collapses the list.

{ Thanks, Camilo. }

9 New Languages in Google Translate

Google Translate supports 9 new languages: Hausa (Nigeria, 35 million speakers), Igbo (Nigeria, 25 million speakers), Yoruba (Nigeria, 28 million speakers), Somali (Somalia, 17 million speakers), Zulu (South Africa, 10 million speakers), Mongolian (Mongolia, China, 6 million speakers), Nepali (Nepal, India, Bhutan 17 million speakers), Punjabi (India, Pakistan, 100 million speakers), Maori (New Zealand, 160,000 speakers). Google Translate now supports 80 languages and that's impressive.

According to Ethnologue, there are 80 languages with more than 10 million native speakers, 200 languages with at least 3 million speakers and 1,300 languages with at least 100,000 speakers. Google Translate supports all the languages with more than 100 million native speakers, 13 of the 16 languages that have between 50 and 100 million speakers, 4 of the 13 languages that have between 30 and 50 million speakers and 15 of the 47 languages that have between 10 and 30 million speakers.

Google Community Translation

You might remember "Google in Your Language", the Google feature that allowed you to translate Google services. It was a great way to help Google support new languages, but you could also use it to find new Google features.

It looks like the translation console will be back. There's a Google Community Translation page that links to a Chrome extension which is not available.

I searched for the extension ID and found a Chrome log with information about the extension: "Tool for providing translations and corrections for Google products". The name of the extension is "Google in Your Language".

{ Thanks, Florian K. }

New Google Translate Interface

Google Translate has a new compact interface that combines the drop-downs that allow you to select the language pairs with the tabs that show the last 3 languages you've selected.

Here's the old interface:

Usually Google does a good job at detecting the language of the original text, so it's a good idea to click "Detect language", unless your text is very short.

{ Thanks, Zachary. }

Align Parallel Texts and Help Improve Google Translate

When you select one the following language pairs in Google Translate: French <-> English or German <-> English, you might see a message at the bottom of the page: "Please help Google Translate improve quality for your language here". The link sends you to a page like this one (French -> English) or this one (German -> English).

It's an interesting way to help Google Translate become more accurate. Here's what you need to do: "In the translated sentence, select the words which mean the highlighted word in the original sentence."

It's likely that all the texts from this experiment are used to train Google Translate and they include professional translations. This might help Google Translate improve the word-level alignment of Google's parallel corpora.

For the English to German pair, you can change the task to "Select all good translations of the following term":

Translate Google+ Posts and Comments

Google+ added translation links for posts and comments written in languages you may not understand. Click "Translate" and Google+ will translate the post and the comments. This only works for public posts and the feature is only available on the desktop Google+ site.

Here's what happens after clicking "Translate":

This feature is not that useful if you use Chrome, since the browser has a built-in translation feature that works in Google+ just like it works for any other site.

"The Google Translate team is always working to make information more accessible to individuals around the world. In Google+ this means bringing people together regardless of their written language, and breaking down language barriers that can limit the exchange of ideas," informs the Google Translate blog.

Google Translate's Safe Mode

Google Translate has a new feature called Safe Mode, but it's not clear what it does. It's only for page translation and Google shows the following message: "Translated in Safe Mode. This may cause problems with some websites, especially those that use plugins like Flash. Click here to disable Safe Mode".

Google uses the "sandbox" parameter to enable the Safe Mode, so you can try it by adding "&sandbox=1" to any Google Translate URL. Here's an example for El Pais, a Spanish news site. When using the Safe Mode, the site redirects to the US version, but that doesn't happen when using the regular mode if you're not in the US.

Maybe the Safe Mode is related to this security issue.

Translate Multilingual Web Pages in Chrome

Google Translate usually detects the predominant language from a text. For example, an English text that includes a few sentences in German and French will be identified as an English text.

If you use the desktop Chrome in English and you visit an English page with a few comments in other languages, Chrome won't translate the page automatically and it won't show the translation bar. To translate the text that's not in English, right-click the page and select "Translate to English".

Here's an example from YouTube:

... and here's the translated page:

Chrome's translation bar says that the page has been translated from English to English. Amazingly, Google translated the comments in Dutch and Portuguese, while preserving the original English text.

If you use the Google Translate site and enter a multilingual text, Google will only translate the text in the predominant language. The same happens when you translate pages. So why is Chrome's translation smarter? Because it slices the text and translates each slice separately.

Please note that this is not limited to English. It's actually the language used by Chrome's interface, which can be changed in the settings, at least if you use Windows.

Here are some examples you can try in Chrome: a YouTube video with multilingual comments, a Google Groups thread with a short text translated in French and Spanish, a list of press releases in both English and French.

Chrome for Android Adds Page Translation

Chrome 28 for Android has a new feature that translates pages automatically. It uses Google Translate and it's similar to the desktop translation feature.

For some reason, Chrome for Android doesn't use the translation settings from the desktop Chrome. They're synced, but the mobile Chrome ignores them. Even if you've asked Chrome in the past to always translate French pages, you'll still see this message: "This page is in Fresch. Translate it to English?" The infobar is placed at the top of the page in the tablet interface and at the bottom of the page in the phone interface.

Google's language detection algorithm is not perfect. If Google didn't detect the language properly, you can tap the corresponding link and choose a different language. You can also pick another language for the translation. After the page is translated, you can check "Always translate [this language]".

After selecting "always translate" and visiting a different page written in the same language, the tablet interface shows an infobar and it quickly disappears. The phone interface shows a persistent infobar and you can tap "more" to disable "always translate". For tablets, you need to quickly tap the infobar and you can disable "always translate".

If you answer "no" two times in a row, you'll see an infobar that lets you choose between "never translate [this language]" and "never translate this site".

Translation settings are not synced in Chrome for Android, not even across mobile devices. If you want to disable the Google Translate integration, go to the Settings page, select "Content settings", then "Google Translate" and turn off this feature.

Full-Screen Google Translate

If you use Google Translate to translate a web page, there's a simple way to get more real estate. To hide the navigation bar and the search box, just the click the arrow button next to: [View: Translation|Original]. It's below the red "sign in" button in the following screenshot:

Of course, you can also use Google Chrome, which has a built-in translation feature.

Help Google Translate Support Māori

Google's homepage links to a page that asks Māori speakers to help Google add this language to Google Translate.

"Google Translate is a free automatic language translation service by Google. It works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead. Google Translate currently supports translation between 71 languages. Our team is working on expanding this list and Māori could be one of the next supported languages with your help. If you speak Māori and English, we will greatly appreciate your help with identifying good Māori translations."

Google links to some pages that allow you to rate translation quality. Please don't use this feature if you don't speak Māori.

From Wikipedia: "Māori (...) is the language of the indigenous population of New Zealand, the Māori. It has the status of an official language in New Zealand. (...) According to a 2001 survey on the health of the Māori language, the number of very fluent adult speakers was about 9% of the Māori population, or 29,000 adults. (...) 157,000 New Zealand residents claim they can converse in Māori about everyday things."

Lorem Ipsum Google Translate

"In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is a placeholder text (filler text) commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout, by removing the distraction of meaningful content. The lorem ipsum text is typically a section of a Latin text by Cicero with words altered, added, and removed that make it nonsensical and not proper Latin". (Wikipedia)

What happens when you use Google Translate to find the English translation of one of the many lorem ipsum texts? You get this:

"We will be sure to post a comment. Add tomato sauce, no tank or a traditional or online. Until outdoor environment, and not just any competition, reduce overall pain. Cisco Security, they set up in the throat develop the market beds of Cura; Employment silently churn-class by our union, very beginner himenaeos. Monday gate information. How long before any meaningful development. Until mandatory functional requirements to developers. But across the country in the spotlight in the notebook. The show was shot. Funny lion always feasible, innovative policies hatred assured. Information that is no corporate Japan."

Well, Google Translate for Latin is still in alpha and the text is nonsensical. There are many actual mistakes in Google Translate. Statistical machine translation sometimes produces humorous results.

{ via waxy.org }

Start the conversation with Google Translate for Android

(Cross posted on the Official Google Blog and Google Translate 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

Rate Google Translations

Google Translate has a new feature that allows users to improve translation quality: rating translations. There are three options: helpful, not helpful and offensive, but Google doesn't let you highlight the text that's poorly translated.


Another way to improve Google Translate is to click a word from the translated text and choose one of the alternate translations. You can also enter a better translation or hold down the shift key and drag the words to reorder them.

While Google Translate supports 64 languages, you probably use it for a small number of language pairs. That's the reason why Google highlights the languages you've recently selected.


{ Thanks, Charlie. }

A New Look for Google Translate

Google Translate is the latest Google service with a new design based on Google+. Since Google Translate's interface is simple, there aren't many changes: a new grey header, updated buttons and drop-downs.


"We're working on a project to bring you a new and improved Google experience, and over the next few months, you'll continue to see more updates to our look and feel. The way people use and experience the web is evolving, and our goal is to give you a more seamless and consistent online experience—one that works no matter which Google product you're using or what device you're using it on," explained Google last month.

After launching a new interface for Google Search, Google created two themes that preview Gmail's new design and started to test Google Calendar's new UI and Blogger's new UI. Up next: Google Docs, Google Sites, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader and probably other services.

{ Thanks, Kon. }

Google Goggles learns Russian and gets a new view

Some of you may already be using the new optical character recognition (OCR) and translation of Russian in Google Goggles that we previewed at last week’s Inside Search event. Starting today, we’re pleased to introduce some additional new features, including a map view of your Search History and the ability to copy contact and text results to the clipboard. We’ve also changed the results interface to make it easier to view and navigate through your results.

Russian optical character recognition (OCR) and translation
Since Google Goggles first launched in 2009, it has been able to recognize and translate text in a number of different languages, as long as the language used Latin characters. With the launch of OCR for Russian, Goggles is now able to read Cyrillic characters. Goggles will recognize a picture of Russian text and allow you to translate the text into one of over 40 other languages. Russian OCR is also available for users of Google Goggles on the Google Search app for iOS. Очень полезно!

You can take a picture of Russian text and translate it into over 40 languages.

Map view of your search history
If you’ve enabled search history on Goggles, your history contains a list of all the images that you’ve searched for, as well as some information about where you performed the search if you chose to share your location with Google. Sometimes this can be a pretty long list, so we wanted to give you another way to sort and visualize your Goggles results.

We’ve added a map view, which shows your Goggles image search history on a map so you can quickly zoom and pan to find a query from a particular location.

Easily toggle between map view and list view with the button in the upper right.

Copy contact and text results to clipboard
Finally, imagine that you wanted to grab a URL or telephone number from a sign and email it to yourself. Now, Goggles gives you the option of copying the recognized text to your phone’s clipboard, allowing you to paste the test into a number of applications.

To try these new features download Google Goggles 1.5 from Android Market, or scan the QR code below with your phone.

Posted by George Nachman, Software Engineer

Google Translate Supports 5 Indic Languages

Google Translate has improved a lot in the past 3 years and it's now the most powerful machine translation service that's available for free. Google Translate is the only machine translation service which supports languages that have less than one million speakers (Maltese, Welsh) and languages that are underrepresented on the Web (Galician).

Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate and they're some of the most popular languages in the world, with more than 600 million speakers: Bengali (300 million speakers), Gujarati (46 million), Kannada (51 million), Tamil (65 million), Telugu (130 million).

"Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google Translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages. (...) 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. (...) Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we've enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards," informs Google.


Google Translate now supports 63 languages and 9 of the 10 languages that have more than 100 million native speakers. The only missing language is Punjabi.

Listen to more languages in Google Translate for Android

(Cross-posted on the Google Translate 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