KEWL!!! A tRAnslATOR sO Me cAN SpEK 2 thE CHInnesse!!

wow this is AMAZING!

You know what if you could now add ‘male’ and ‘female’ languages then it would be a true winner, definately the next killer app of all time.

dt

Hm, a bit surprised by the snarky remarks. If you view this through the lens of a huge multinational corporation that has project teams with members from around the globe, a translation service like this would be incredibly valuable. Making language a non-factor (bit of a leap I know) could result in huge efficiency boosts.

Translating on google talk is one thing,.. but what if the two people in the example actually do go skiing.. they won’t be able to communicate face to face so i guess the next step is a google talk mic strapped to the voicebox of them both for when they do hit the slopes.. happy holidays!

I think some of the translation issues are quirky in Google, but I have to agree with Lee here - this concept is freakin’ amazing. It reminds me of that old television commercial (can’t remember for who), where this little girl gets on a video conference with her data or something and they are talking to a table of Japanese and she is talking English and then the commercial jumps to the Japanese conf. room and they are all talking Japanese… its the video conferencing software that’s doing the real-time language translation.

At the time, that felt like such a Sci-Fi technology, but HELLO people, this is real - at least at some level. Maybe not video conferencing, but chat - it’s really amazing. I think this is going to pave the way for some really good communication.

This would be a great service for Skype to use. With so many people using the Skype platform as an affordable means of communicating with people internationally, this would be a natural extension of its service. It could be integrated into Skype chat.

Digress:

Mike, you made it to the Forbes web celeb list!

Congratulations to you and your team!

http://www.forbes.com/2007/12/.....8land.html

Web needs Google to evolve.

Machine translation has been a joke for way too long, and Gs approach (using algorithms to learn from pre-translated text), which is a novel one in comparison to, say SYSTRAN, will only get better with time.

Useful machine translation apps like the G Talk one are truly game changing ideas.

Why won’t more entrepreneurs strive to really innovate like this, instead of putting out a Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, etc carbon copies?

Innovation is happening right now. Perhaps not as fast as we’d like, but we’re really spoiled when it comes to this.

Hi, please help me, I’ve heard about your concerns with net neutrality, I am being automatically censored pretty heavy online, because me and 2 friends of mine have become victims of some sort of organized crime group using bioelectromagnetic (ultrasound) weapons at our homes, and we can proove that the FBI simply will let your children be harassed in hopes that they will kill themselves as well. http://www.youtube.com/rhyspaulhovey you can download a recording of the machine. I have never harmed anyone, I’m just a video games engineer from Canada.

This is incredible! How come the machine translation so good?
I would rather take this as a fake news.

Just an aside about Google, and this blog, and how it is planned as a political forum, Google’s cache has been able to “prove” basically how I am censored on Wikipedia, and ABC newsblogs,I find this sick, especially when 70 or so men “speak on behalf” of 300,000,000 million right now, about killing based on the word of proven lairs, now that can be seen to be blatantly condoning the murder of children, and covering up gang rapes for their “friends”. I think that the internet can be instrumental. If you are into this blog, please use it to speak your mind on that political forum that is coming up here. Cache it too or something. http://www.myantiwar.com does the same thing, proves time and time again that the constitution is being broken by those same criminals that we are supposed to trust?? 70 Billion dollars is a lot of death, especially on the trust of proven lairs and cover up artists.

I have tried german-english and english-german translations. These two languages are close (much closer than english-chinese).

The resulting translation is not usable. It doesn’t only select wrong words for translation but also the translation is incomplete, e.g. some sentences are missing verbs.

Google is letting far too many incomplete ideas to public. It is good for marketing purposes but seriously damaging it’s image among IT professionals who were the ones who did a lot of mouth propaganda for Google.

^ #14 Above actually got translated wrong by google. What Rhys actually typed in was, “¡Me gusta google!

Cool! now I can learn how to speak other languages free of charge.

Nhick
http://www.itrush.com

Well, Google has won a court case with the US government, and I do like them somewhat for that, considering what I am seeing from the FBI these days about me and my friends case, and what I am seeing on ABC and WikiPedia, in fact I hope that this “vote simulation” that will happen on this blog does not get a computer program run on it, that is simply fake votes and fake testimony/argument. I can show that these programs exist pretty easy as well. This blog site is set up to allow one actually, because it does not require the OCR test (the typical scrambled characters) so a script could be run on it to try to show the “everyone wants net regulation” or whatever side of the vote. I could not do it personally, nor do I want to break any law, but I would LOVE to see some international hackers of the world, all operate at the same time, blame each other, and hack all of the mainpages for the mainstream media and show some of the things that are being repressed online, or even Google champion some of these issues themselves legally. After all they have a GIANT stack of doe, and need to be friend of the net

now does the bot serve contextual ads, too?

If you think German-to-English is bad, try Arabic to English. It’s not even close to being right - It would make me uncomfortable to know that my translation could be taken the COMPLETELY wrong way. Interesting idea, but I think it still has a long way to go before becoming a truly great app.

This is awesome news, as we here at What’s Hot Today.com found Babel Fish somewhat limited. Kudos to Google

http://www.whatshottoday.com

I would like to see the graph (based on more than 600 people)

Who have heard of gtalk?
Who have used gtalk?
who use it daily?

Thanks, .rb

p.s. This counts as do no evil as long as its a service without ads

While I was pleased to see the Celtic languages, including Cornish and Manx on the list, I couldn’t see American English. I hope this hasn’t been overlooked?

You might think that English and American English are the same language, but they aren’t - not by a long way. You see, I’m an English writer and much of the fiction I write is set in the U.S. Therefore, I need to translate into American.

For instance, if I write that the visiting Scottish sailor was wearing a Fair Isle jumper, an American would understand that he was wearing a pinafore dress, rather than a jersey (or guernsey or sweater.) This could give entirely the wrong idea about the character…

Ameican writers who set their stories in the British Isles will no doubt wish to translate their stories into English, so that they don’t drop clangers either.

Best wishes,
Sue - just off to dunk her ginger nuts in her cup of Rosie Lee.
–

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
…
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOkxRLzBf0

English to Klingon seems to be working just fine.

It gets all the swear words and idioms right.

Too bad no one uses it, and that Yahoo! did it many years ago.

Oh, whoops, I’m posting in my The Hater persona instead of..

Sincerely,
Angela Hayden
THE ART GODDESSSS

Google definately will dominate the world!

http://digg.com/people/Please_....._with_this

Sounds more like the Monty Python Phrase book than a Babel Fish…

The guys who have nailed the API for language translation is Worldlingo. They have 13 million unique visitors per month, the exclusive with Microsoft office, and a massively scalable back-end. Demoxi.com, a Monster Ventures Partners backed company, is using the Worldlingo API with good success. More info on Worldlingo’s chat translator here: http://www.worldlingo.com/en/p.....lator.html

I suggested just this in May, though I thought it would be better suited for Meebo:

“A suggestion for Google or Meebo…”
http://techfold.com/2007/05/23.....l-nirvana/

In comments, it came up that the service already exists at transclick.com.

They need the chinese to have an audio output in “ping ying” so that you know how to say in Chinese the phrase you just typed in English. Perhaps that’ll be v2.0

@Duncan, nice use of a Douglas Adams quote, Mate!

The value of Google’s translation tools is that they use a different technique to others. This development doesn’t leverage that, so it’s pretty much a waste of effort (though admittedly, probably just one or two programmer-days of effort!).

If you still have to check three sources for each translation, then having one of them available through IM and the other two through websites merely makes life more complicated. If Google were serious about addressing the usability issues with their translations, they’d look at ways of combining their database-guided approach with conventional grammar-guided approaches.

As an example of what I mean, if I want to translate the title “The Taming of the Shrew”, then Google is likely to give me the best results (assuming their engine has seen the translation before), but if I want to translate any of the text of the play, then it’s likely to give the worst results of the sites I use. It ought to be possible to produce a service which has a reasonable stab at deciding which approach to use for any given text.

And Brin vanished in a puff of smoke.

I think the bigger market is for someone to translate some of the techcrunch comments (in English) to understandable comments (in English). Comprendez vous?

I’ve just played with English to Russian bot a bit. It seems that the translation is mostly context-independent. It will be sufficient for a simple keyword exchange but hardy usable for an extended conversation. I highly doubt the translation quality will get better any time soon, natural language processing is just too hard. I guess they’ll add some new languages instead.

Machine translation simply does not work well, especially between distant languages. This is an area I have studied for about ten years now. We decided to build entirely around human translation. That has its own limits (scarcity of translators), but the quality is much better because someone who translates into their native language will also know the subtleties of the language (like how to properly organize a sentence so it reads well). I could write at length about why MT does not work, but that is the topic for an extended article.

FYI, if anyone here is interested in website translation and localization, we released a WYSIWYG localization tool. Live demo at http://www.worldwidelexicon.org, pick a language (Hungarian for example), then click on the pencil icon and see what happens. It makes translating a site or UI a WYSIWYG process. It’s very easy for translators to work with. This utility is open source (BSD license), so you can use it for your site or web app as-is or with modifications.

I’ll give this a real-time working over with some of my staff members who do not communicate very well in English. (They’re Chinese.)

I’ve had experience with something similar and as long as the conversation is kept at a fairly simple level — and you have a lot of patience and are willing to explain things when necessary — it can work.

What would have been better (or, a nice to have option) would be to include a reverse translation. Yes, this means three lines for one line of chat, but I’d like to see this as an option. This way I can get a better idea of what was translated.

For example, the first sentence is my typed sentence. Next is the translation in the target language. But then there is a reverse translation of the translation in the target language. When doing it this way, you’ll sometimes find, quite obviously, that the translation was off. This can help avoid any misunderstandings rather quickly.

Did you know that “I’m buying a fence” translates to “Bill Gates”? It does. (Not necessarily in Google, but I experienced this when my conversational partner used the most popular language translation system used by Chinese.) So you can imagine that REVERSE translation would be nice, just to verify how things were translated and if there could be any misunderstandings.

Let’s face it, there will always be misunderstandings. In large part, the problem with language translation systems is that they can’t recognize cultural subtleties. But, like I said, for simple discourse, they’re fine.

I can imagine this service being useful at a basic level, but it would be interesting to see how it handles IM slang “dat many ppl use”

@dailytwitter: I think you’re looking for an implementation of the point-of-view gun.

It may not be perfect, but real-time chat translation is a cool idea.

Here’s a quick (and funny) way to see what happens with mangled translations: http://www.blahblahfish.com . My favorite: ‘Oh, shit’ translated to Korean and back.