Starting Points: Google Translate

May 15, 2010

Google Translate and Google Squared Expand Services

Official Google Blog: This week in search 5/14/10

This week, we announced a number of new search enhancements.

Google Translate learns and speaks new languages
This week, we launched 5 new "alpha" languages on Google Translate — Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Georgian and Urdu. We also extended our support for spoken translations to 29 more languages. With these launches, you can now translate text, webpages and documents between 57 languages, and hear translations spoken in 36 languages. For many search queries where you want to translate a word or a phrase, we offer a translation powered by Google Translate directly in our search results. We also recently added romanization to this feature — when translating to or from a foreign language, you can now see the translation written phonetically in roman characters.

Example searches: [translate how are you? to chinese] or [translate обезьяна]

Twenty more languages in Google search get virtual keyboard
Recently, we announced that we've integrated virtual keyboards into Google Search homepages in 35 languages. Virtual keyboard lets you type directly in your local language script in an easy and consistent manner, no matter where you are or what computer you’re using. Feedback is always important to us, and we were excited to get more than three thousand votes for other languages you felt the keyboard should be launched in. Today, we're happy to announce that we are adding Virtual Keyboard to another 20 languages — making it now available in 55 languages.

For those of you who speak a language we don't yet support, we're hard at work adding the virtual keyboard into more languages listed in Google Language Tools page. You can also vote for the languages you'd like us to add next. We always appreciate your feedback as we continue our efforts to help you input text in your desired languages as easily as possible.

Example languages we added this week:

Finding short answers

Image by Search Engine People Blog via Flickr

This week, we introduced a new feature that brings the technology of Google Squared right to your search results. Squared makes it easier to highlight answers for fact-based queries, so you can get more accurate answers, faster. Now, you'll see these answers right at the top of your search results, brought to you from across the web. And, we've also made sure this feature works great on mobile browsers.

Example searches: [timezone in nevada] or [when was jean-jacques rousseau born]

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next week for more search news.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Mar 4, 2009

What Kind of Blog Is This?

It's a blog on contemporary affairs to make you think a bit. Hopefully, the countries and cultural areas covered will be of mutual interest. If not, thanks for visiting. Maybe we'll meet elsewhere.

I'll post some of my own viewpoints but nothing definitive. You will have to work a little to get better answers about sometimes complex and controversial issues. That's partly why a significant amount of possible interaction with me is built into the blog (screened comments on postings, my Gmail address (john.a.macdougall@gmail.com), my Facebook pages (you have to join or login if you're not already a member), with Google Talk (john.a.macdougall) and Skype (johnamacdougall) also possible but held in reserve because these tools can get too complex for many persons and disruptive to, ah, among others, me -- sorry about that. For related reasons, no land line or mobile calls. Many thanks.

Thrashing out issues is also why there are some old and new media search tools in the sidebar. Without ignoring print, the great variety of net resources is vastly underused.

That's also why there is, at the bottom of this main page, an always changing, breaking newsfeed, solely on the blog's topics, reflecting my main concerns. Clicking on any of those headlines will take you to the full story behind them. Thanks to Google for this gadget!

If you prefer to read in some other language than English, try using one or more of the translation aides on the net like Google Translate, Yahoo! Babel Fish, or the awesome FoxLingo add-on to the Firefox browser. Links to other translators are also neatly presented on the FoxLingo homepage.

Welcome to my world, all you good people. Together, let's make things happen. Yes, we can!

And how could I say hello without sending you a song, nay, a veritable concert by one of my younger friends. :-)