Written on November 2, 2008 – 1:41 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
YouTube is making some serious efforts to breach the language barriers we Europeans face on a daily basis. I’d love to watch some interesting Italian documentary on YouTube, yet my knowledge of the Italian language is limited to the words needed for ordering food or drinks. The Google-owned video giant now offers a solution.
If the person who has uploaded a video also added captions, YouTube adds real-time machine translation. From the YouTube blog:
To get a translation for your preferred language, move the mouse over the bottom-right arrow, and then over the small triangle next to the CC (or subtitle) icon, to see the captions menu. Click on the “Translate…” button and then you will be given a choice of many different languages.
The machine translation is far from perfect and you’ll have to make an effort to understand what the Italian man is saying. Yet it’s a good first step which might inspire YouTube users to translate more videos.
I hope you like that post!
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The BBC reports on this hilarious road sign. As you can see the English is clear enough but the Welsh at the bottom reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”
When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the out of office reply was what they needed.
So that is what they printed on the sign. Apparently it happens so often that a local newspaper has a special section showing all the Welsh/English translation screw ups.
Written on August 25, 2008 – 10:37 pm Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Not sure if it’s enough to change Preston Galla’s perception of Google (he just penned a thought-provoking piece on Computerworld about the search giant losing its mojo), but this is quite handy for people like myself: the company has introduced a new OneBox for quick and dirty translations.
All you have to do is type in “translate” followed by the word you want to have translated (and optionally the words “into English”), and out comes a handy translation result right before general search results for that term. The results stem from its own bilingual directory.
As Google Operating System points out, you can’t use the search box as a shortcut for Google Translate because full texts aren’t yet translated. The bilingual dictionary is only available for the following language pairs: English <-> French/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/German/Russian/Chinese/Korean/Hindi. The blog has also found some translation results to be accompanied with image results, but I haven’t been able to replicate it at my end.
(Via Zorgloob, who picked a far less friendly search query to demonstrate the new functionality) :)
As you might have noticed now and then almost none of the Next Web editors are native English speakers. We do have a lot of native English readers who send us tips and correct our grammar and of course we use our spelling checkers and check each others posts. But interpreting words will always stay a challenge for us. As Antonio Porchia said in 1943 (translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin):
What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.
In Europe we have a problem with languages. Every country has its own language so offering a simple service for everybody there is a lot of work. People also underestimate the effort it takes to offer something in multiple languages. Google is now offering most of their services in 40 different languages. You might think that this is just a matter of translating every word on a website. But it is more difficult than that:
Take Hebrew or Arabic, which are written from right to left. An Arabic speaker may search for [world cup football 2008] [كأس العالم 2008 لكرة القدم]. Part of the query will be written from right to left in Arabic, while the numbers will be written left to right. Sometimes the right-to-left difference can mean having to change the entire layout of a page, as with Gmail.
Or take Russian, where words change depending on their placement and role in a sentence. In Russian, for example [pizza in Moscow] is [пицца в Москве] but [pizza near Moscow] is [пицца рядом с Москвой].
It is a very good idea to offer your service in more languages than one. Just remember that there is more to language than just words.
Written on November 2, 2008 – 1:41 pm
Written on October 31, 2008 – 9:32 pm
Written on August 25, 2008 – 10:37 pm
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