Google goes polyglottal
GOOGLIE TWO-SHOES adds 10 different languages to its online translation arsenal this week
Snuck out via a Google blog post, Jeff Chin a product manager over at the search engine company announced to all and sundry a whole bank of new tongues to Google Translate.
“Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in making information universally accessible,” he burbled
From the machine translation team within Google Research, they’re happy to report they’ve been hard at work to overcome this challenge. Google now has brought the grand total of translation abilities to the princely sum of 23 languages. The bog post goes on to list Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish as the latest additions.
Also, Googlers can now translate text and web pages as well as perform cross-language searches between any two languages in the formidable catalogue. So those boycotting following or attending the Olympics in Beijing this autumn, will now be able to more easily find and access content from local resources.
In addition to this bounty of announcements, Google has also stumped up an option of "Detect Language" which will automatically help identify the mother-tongue of the text trying to be translated. This works best with longer passages. Those that have embedded the Google Translate My Page gadget in their web sites will have these new languages automatically appearing. Developers will also be able to take advantage of these new features in their AJAX language API, just in case they were feeling left out.
The post goes on to add a little disclaimer, “While our system is quite good, we know it's not perfect ... so if you find a translation that’s not quite right, let us know by using our Suggest a better translation ”.
This could be quite a task within itself.
For the record, Yahoo has a similar engine, here. µ
L'Inq
Google.blogspot.com
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Just for the kick of it I tried it out. I had this very article translated into czech. The result was hilarious, couldn't stop laughing. But I guess amusement wasn't Google's aim.

While I admit that your INQ banter isn't the easiest piece of english to translate and czech isn't really simple language either, the czech version was practically unreadable (it might had something to do with tears in my eyes). I just couldn't understand it and had to check (czech?) back to original every now and again just to know what was Google trying to tell me. It was very cryptic indeed.

It might work for someone with a lot of fantasy trying to decipher BBC news. But I woulnd't say the "system is quite good". It's funny but definitely not good or practical.
Machine translation still has a long way to go.
It just happened that last night I was helping a friend with some translation, and we did some comparisons between Babelfish, and Google translate.
Google seems to be a bit more accurate if you could call it that, but it is definitely far from reliable.
I tried one form of a Portuguese question asking "are you tired", and the English translation came out as a question asking "who are you sleeping with".
For someone trying to maintain a crosscultural long distance relationship, it might be better to stick to using a dictionary, and taking language classes.
We've recently started a volunteer project of assessing the quality of different online translation services here: www.pclingua.com

This far we've done General News and Soccer topics and assessed Google, Systran, PROMT, WordLingo and a couple of more providers.