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Changes to Google Translate  (View post)

Scott [PersonRank 0]

Thursday, May 8, 2008
16 years ago10,102 views

Check it out ... Google Translate has more translation options and a slicker interface. (I think that the changes happened in the past day or so. Or am I late to the party?)

http://google.com/translate_t

You can even ask Google Translate to detect a language (e.g., Hebrew) that the service doesn't yet translate.

http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ok.co.il%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=auto&tl=en

Above 1 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

dpneal [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I think Google uses traditional combo boxes when javascript is turned off.

This is definitely getting a very good service.

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

So many new languages!
Example: Croatian:
Zovem se Tom i ja živim u Francuskoj. Ja često čitali ovaj website.

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Finnish is a new language appeared to the list today.
Example:
"Suomi on uusi kieli näytti luettelon tänään."

Sounds funny, however, because Finnish is very difficult language...

MVB [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Because javascript combo boxes do not have any problems with modal windows – which might still be coming ?

Nuno [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

It's much better now. But it could be even better.

I often translate from english to portuguese and vice versa. It would be perfect if there were 2 translate buttons: one to translate in one direction, the other doing it vice versa. Then I wouldn't have to change the language buttons all the time.

Best regards

Ianf [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Wonders Philipp why Google does not employ traditional combo boxes [listing "Spanish to English", say] for its language-pairs duty.
http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-translator-redesign-2008-5.png
That may be indicative of a goal to write a client for "asymmetric" use, ie. one where input language picks the available range of target languages; where various languages are translattable into different subsets of target lanuages; in short, a client that will adapt transparently to a continuously growing set of language-translation pairs.

Mikael [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

There are many new languages on the list: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.

I still have the old interface (and the old languages) though.

Manoj Nahar [PersonRank 4]

16 years ago #

Hindi translation sucks. I will update with screen shots later.

Ianf [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

[put at-character here]Manoj Nahar: noted.

Not sure whether, apart from your very self, we [the collective Blogoscoperatti] possess the qualifications to judge the degree of to/from-Hindi suckiness, as per your claim. Isn't there a Google Translate blog, where such might be more appreciated?

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

> Wonders Philipp why Google does not employ traditional combo
> boxes [listing "Spanish to English", say] for its language-pairs
> duty.

I don't think that's what Philipp meant. I think he was asking why they're using DHTML drop downs rather than traditional <select> form elements. Whatever the logic was behind using DHTML, surely it could have been achieved with a <select> drop downs too – using one for the source and one for the target languages. (Unless the reason is as MVB says, and they're getting ready for adding DHTML overlays or something.)

David Mulder [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

The link in the article links to the language tools(http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en) where the old layout is used instead of http://www.google.com/translate_t. Still the biggest change is not the redesign, but the fact that it most likely is translating a query first to english and next to the secundary language, prove of this is for example the dutch query "Ik ben zo vreselijk blij, dat ik zou willen dansen" which results in Jeg er så forfærdeligt glad for, at jeg gerne vil danse., and I am quite sure that "glad for" is not danish, but of course I could be mistaken.

Zim [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

This is nice, now it would be useful to have this in google reader. Sometimes my friends shared items are in french or other languages, and I don't understand everything.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Thanks David, I added an update. Why does Google have two pages for this?

mrbene [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Translating from English to English doesn't seem to be supported:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fblogoscoped.com%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=en&tl=en

However, it seems that all other non-identical pairings are.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

MrBene, which sentence did you want to translate from English to English? Maybe one of us can help.

Oh, just kidding :)

I wondered though why Google allows the user to make this selection in the first place, they control what's in each combo box, and can change it in real-time anyway no?

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

[put at-character here]MrBene : this was available, and great for using Google Translate as a web proxy. But it as been disabled for some months.

Michael Fagan [PersonRank 3]

16 years ago #

I'm unclear if anyone has pointed this out exactly, but it seems you can now choose to translate between *any* two languages on the list. The dropdown before this change only supported certain combinations eg english->french, but not any (eg arabic->swedish).

This new functionality means either
a) Google is rolling out more of their own translation work (is anything still powered by Systran?) or
b) if you choose a combination that wasn't available before, they actually do two translations (eg arabic->english->swedish). this option results in very poor translation (duh), as could be seen with InterTran before http://www.tranexp.com/

also, @Nuno, I agree. on my old (mostly broken now) http://faganfinder.com/translate/ there is a "switch" button that swaps the "to" and "from" languages. it wouldn't be hard to add that in to google's with greasemonkey...

mrbene [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

[put at-character here]Tom : If the end goal is to prevent use as a web proxy, there's been a miscommunication somewhere – since the tool will allow an English page to be translated "from" a different language into English:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fblogoscoped.com&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=es&tl=en

It does seem that at this time the "from" language is ignored, since instructions to translate from Spanish to French (for example) result in this page being translated from English to French:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fblogoscoped.com&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=es&tl=fr

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Yeah, the link
http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en
works still and is a very different page than Google Translator itself.
And, to add: the Google Translator states that it is in Beta phase. Language Tools doesn't.

NucheseeMep [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

omg.. good work, brother

Veky [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

TOMHTML, I understand what you were trying to say (Croatian is my mother tongue), but it's utterly ungrammatical and mildly funny:-). May I ask, did you translate from French or from English to Croatian?

Scott [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

By the way, it appears that the new language pairs are supported in the Google AJAX Language API (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/). You can test this by changing the language pairs in one of the examples (http://www.google.com/uds/samples/language/translate.html) in the Developer's Guide (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/).

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