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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.
"They'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 their look and feel. The way people use and experience the web is evolving, and their
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.
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, they’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, they
release alpha languages when they
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; they 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, they
’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.
They 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.
When they built Google Translate they thought it was a cool tool, but we have to admit they 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 they 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.
Google Demo Slam: Translate Beat Box HQ Video
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.
Wiwi Kuan: Google Translate Song HQ Video
