Google has recently announced on its official blog new features and a new look for Google Translate, which now includes a text to speech function, real time translation functionality and phonetic transliterations for a number of languages including Chinese, Arabic and Persian.
As Translate product manager Awaneesh Verma wrote in the post, today Translate offers 51 languages (covering the native languages of 98 percent of Internet users) and allows users to translate text from and to any possible combination of them, for a total 2550 possible language pairs.
The first of the newly introduced features is the ability to display the translated text immediately as text is being typed by the user, and without the need to hit the “Translate” button like before. Oddly enough, the button is however still there—perhaps to accommodate older browsers that might have compatibility issues.
Another addition is the text-to-speech functionality. For now, the voice synthesizer is only available for text in English (and therefore only makes sense when you are translating from a foreign language into English). This feature seems reliable and the voice reads the text with very good intonation and expressivity, even though there is no option to speed up the reproduction.
Finally, Google also introduced the option to read and write a language phonetically to ease the translation process. For instance, after translating into Chinese, users can now display the phonetical transliteration to help them read the content, as well as typing Chinese words phonetically and have them translated directly into English.
The form to suggest better translations has also been made more prominent, and Google will in all likelihood use the data submitted by users to constantly improve the quality of translations, which is already quite satisfactory in most cases.
Once landed on the Translate homepage, users can simply start typing or paste some text into the box, even if they don’t know exactly the language it is written in (in which case they can simply select the “detect language” option, which seems to work fine).
For simple phrases, the dictionary functionality will display additional information towards the bottom of the page. Regardless of the size of the text in the form, hovering the mouse on any word of the translation will display the original text as a mean of easily verifying that the tool managed to get the context and choose the most appropriate translation.
Entire webpages can be translated by simply entering the page URL into the box: a framed page will show up with the automatically translated text as a result. Finally, Arabic, Persian and Hindi text can now be typed phonetically and are then automatically converted to their native alphabets without the need for a special keyboard.
Dario Borghino is a computer engineering student at Turin's Polytechnic, Italy. He started writing science and technology related articles in February 2008 and his articles have appeared on sites such as ISEdb.COM, eHow and Suite101.com.You can visit his personal Web site here.
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