Usage Examples in Google Translate

Google Translate has a new button that shows word usage examples from the web. This works for both original text and the translated text, but it's no limited to single words: Google can also find examples for longer texts and even translate them for you.

"At Google we're always curious about new words from around the world, from all languages, and we think one of the best ways to understand and make sense of new words is by observing them in their natural habitat. Our latest feature does just that by providing you with example sentences taken from fresh new stories around the web," explains Google.

There's also a "select all" button that selects the entire translated text, so that it's easier to copy.

{ Thanks, Emanuele and Dean. }

Tabs in Google Translate

Google Translate made it easier to translate a text into multiple languages by adding tabs. When you select a language from one of the two lists, it's added as a tab and you can quickly switch between the most recent three languages. Google's language detection works pretty well, so I'm not sure why there are tabs for the source languages, but the tabs for the target languages are useful.


You've probably noticed that Google Translate's custom drop-downs for selecting languages remember the most recent languages you've selected and highlight them.


In other Google Translate news, the Android app's conversation mode now supports 14 languages. "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," informs Google.

{ Thanks, Xavier. }

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 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.

Google Translate, Now With Voice Input

Google Chrome 11 added support for HTML speech input API. "With this API, developers can give web apps the ability to transcribe your voice to text. When a web page uses this feature, you simply click on an icon and then speak into your computer's microphone. The recorded audio is sent to speech servers for transcription, after which the text is typed out for you."

Google Translate is the first Google service that uses this feature. If you use Google Chrome 11 Beta, Google Chrome 12 Dev/Canary or a recent Chromium build and visit Google Translate, you can click the voice input icon. Right now, this feature only works for English, so you need to select "English" from the list of input languages.


Unfortunately, the results aren't great. I tried to translate "beautiful sunshine" into French, but the speech-to-text engine didn't work properly and Google had to translate "wake up beautiful sunshine girl".


{ Thanks, Kalin. }