Google translate speaks to the world

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Posted on 17 Nov 2009 at 15:03

Google has announced the latest updates to its online translator. These include instant translation - Google has done away with the Translate button and now translates each word as you type.

Overall translation quality is surprisingly good, but some languages fare better than others. It correctly positioned words into their grammatically correct structure when we translated from English into Greek.

French to English and English to Greek were both accurate, but our Spanish to English translations suffered from occasional dropped words and errors in grammar. English to Spanish was better.

Translate is great if you just want to make yourself understood or quickly convert a message from a foreign pen pal. Like any automatic translation tool, it's not appropriate for most business uses and is no substitute for a professional translation service.

Translate can now also translate from phonetic Arabic, Persian and Hindi using the transliteration feature, which is useful if you're fluent in a one of these languages but don't have the relevant fonts or keyboard layout.

Another new feature is the 'show romanization' option, which presents a phonetic pronunciation guide. This is handy if you want to know how to say something in a language with an unfamiliar script. Finally, a text-to-speech function means that, when translating into English, you can hear the translations spoken to you by a pleasant-sounding voice synthesiser.

Author: Kat Orphanides