I was always wondering when they will start translating with Arabic. I hope they start Arabic <-> Other Languages, too. Arabic is really language to translate with Google, I admit .. German would be for example much easier for their PCs.
الآن يمكننى ان اكتب اى شئ باللغة العربية هنا و سوف يفهمنى الجميع

Your sentence translates to "Now I can write anything here in Arabic and will be understood by all." That translation seems almost perfect... 90%?

Wow that is an excellent translation. I can read arabic and do very simple translation and that is a brilliant translation for a machine.

btw....Ramibotros did you derive the arabic text from an english <-> arabic translation? or did you type the arabic yourself?

I would love to try it with something like an arabic speech or article. See how it compares with context based terms of the language.

Ok check this out. From the Al-Jazeera arabic site

الحوار اللبناني يستأنف مجددا بعد أسبوعين لحسم رئاسة لحود

أنهى أطراف الحوار الوطني اللبناني أعمال جلستهم السادسة مساء الجمعة دون التوصل إلى اتفاق بشأن بند رئاسة الجمهورية, مع الإعلان عن عقد جلسة أخرى بعد أسبوعين. وتشير التوقعات إلى احتمال الاتفاق على إكمال الرئيس إميل لحود فترته الرئاسية.

translates to

"Lebanese dialogue will resume again after two weeks to resolve the presidency Lahoud

The parties to the dialogue Lebanese national work meeting 6 pm Friday without reaching agreement on the item Presidency of the Republic, with the announcement of the holding of another meeting after two weeks. Expectations point to the possibility of agreement on the completion of his term as President Emile Lahoud presidential. "

Although some of it doesn't fit in well, I would say the gist of the subject matter is present and someone who can look beyond the grammatical english errors.

One of the amazing things just looking at the translation is the fact that Google inserts capitals into the english translation where they believe something to be a name or title. As you may or may not be aware, the arabic language does not have the capitalised and non-capitalised structure like English and so Google would need to insert this as part of their translation algorithm.

oops that was meant to be

...and someone who can look beyond the grammatical english errors, may be able to understand what is being talked about.

btw, imagine automating Google translate for emails or IM. So you could talk in your own language and Google would act as a proxy and translate for another person who can talk in another language.

I wrote my sentence from my mind. I can speak Arabic and I can say that Utills' text didn't loose its meaning when translated.

> As you may or may not be aware, the arabic language does not have the
> capitalised and non-capitalised structure like English and so Google would
> need to insert this as part of their translation algorithm.

The thing is this new system is completely automated. Google doesn't have to think about such things. They feed system with Arabic text and their English human translations and it finds such rules by itself.

Great Mixing Lebanese Politics with Google Translation.

Arabic is a hard working translation Languages, you may lose the whole insidght meaning in the most accurate tools in the market google Ajeeb etc....

Even now seekport.co.uk are getting hold to introduce an arabic Search engine ...tuff

I almost forgot, I will send Phil a New Year Card from Google 2005 2006 , ,,, Hmm Guess what I still have it and it is a mutlinational card but but but the ARABIC is totally wrong.
it is a word by word translation wrongly typed as you are typing in english from left to right.

You will just Laugh once you see it

Utils said:

> btw, imagine automating Google translate for emails or IM.
> So you could talk in your own language and Google would
> act as a proxy and translate for another person who can
> talk in another language.

This really wouldn't be that difficult to do at all. SDL International already offer their fee-based SDLChat Translator subscription service to do this for AOL Instant Messenger users:

http://www.chattranslator.com/

This uses their Enterprise Translation Server to perform the translations – which is a rules-based machine translation system.

Of course, Google will probably plug their machine translation system into Google Talk and Gmail for free...

(Disclaimer: I work for SDL International.)

Also see Philipp's earlier post http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-05-22-n83.html

If Google's new Machine Translation is already very good for highly different languages like Arabic/ English, we have reason to assume when they release their new translator for German/ English, English/ French etc., we'll see a vast improvement over Babel Fish and other existing translators. Maybe near perfection? I wonder why they went ahead and first released Arabic/ English, not one of the presumably better working language pairs, like French/ English. I'd bet they already have those pairs in store.

I say ego.
See, Arabic is really a hard language to translate. So why not show the huge improvement they have made? If they first had showed German <-> English, everybody would say: Ah, okay nice. Not that great, but better then the competitors.
With Arab they can now prove, that there is an enhancement in their technique.

Philipp, my guess is that they got some kind of funding for an Arabic version, or have a big customer in mind. The chosen phrase for the screenshot suggests they are targeting the current paranoia.

This is going to be big. I'd love to see versions for European languages.

Is this launch of the English / Arabic translator have a link with the launch, in the same time, of Google Morocco?
http://www.google.co.ma/webhp?hl=en

I am excited for this to be finally released. It is frustrating when Google announces things they are working on, because then I want them now. Even worse than learning about new versions of OS X :)

I've been hoping for a while that when this is finally released (more than just this one language pair), it'll be seamlessly integrated with nearly everything. This could, theoretically, make as big a splash as Google Maps or Gmail, if it is launched well. I hope they don't pull a Search History and slowly release the feature for one service at time.

Hehe, it still isn't perfect. It translated "catch" (as in "did you catch the show the other night") as "fishing".

Oh well, I'm sure it is better than most other automatic Arabic translations. It is amazingly good with proper nouns.

Hi,

It looks really brilliant as a start, but the Arabic translation is still full of typos and misspellings. I am talking from a professional translator's view, but it is really a great start and I hope Google hires professional linguists to refine the Arabic corpus.