https://googledata.org Everything Google: News, Products, Services, Content, Culture Fri, 03 Apr 2015 21:58:02 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1 https://googledata.org/google-translate/point-tap-brush-and-listen/ https://googledata.org/google-translate/point-tap-brush-and-listen/#comments Thu, 09 Aug 2012 18:24:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=64848e6bbea48af2651c5c898599a439 With our latest update to our Google Translate app for Android, we’re aiming to get one step closer to the Babel fish. By integrating Google Goggles’ optical character recognition (OCR) technology, we’ve made it possible for you to use the camera of your Android smartphone to input text without typing. This makes Google Translate for Android one of our most intelligent and machine learning-intensive apps. Speech recognition, handwriting recognition, OCR, and machine translation all rely on powerful statistical models built on billions of samples of data. Here’s how it comes together:






To use our new camera feature, push the camera button, point at some text, tap to freeze the picture, brush the part you want with your finger, et voila -- enjoy your machine translation. As usual, you can click the text-to-speech icons to listen to the source text or the translated text. We currently support optical character recognition for Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, and we’re also working hard to get more languages on the list.

Now give it a try -- translate your favorite tapas menu items quicker when you’re visiting Barcelona, decipher those mysterious Australian roadsigns, and finally learn how to pronounce the name of your favorite Russian movie. Leave us a comment on Google Play to tell us what you think.

Posted by Etienne Deguine - Associate Product Manager for Google Translate

]]> https://googledata.org/google-translate/point-tap-brush-and-listen/feed/ 0 https://googledata.org/google-translate/observing-words-in-their-natural-habitat-example-sentences-in-google-translate/ https://googledata.org/google-translate/observing-words-in-their-natural-habitat-example-sentences-in-google-translate/#comments Fri, 13 Jul 2012 17:21:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=0aed91b152c6a5228b0621a6f8eda7f4 Did you know that more than 5000 new words are created each year? At Google we’re always curious about new words from around the world, from all languages, and we think one of the best ways to understand and make sense of new words is by observing them in their natural habitat. Our latest feature does just that by providing you with example sentences taken from fresh new stories around the web.

To try out the feature, simply type a few words in the left-hand text box of Google Translate, and then click on the example sentence icon:

Along with alternate translations (a feature that lets you click on a word to see different translations), and our dictionary results (literal translations extracted from our dictionaries), we hope that being able to look at example sentences will make machine translation more useful for you -- and a little more educational. Stay tuned as we continue to improve and enrich our corpus of example sentences.


Posted by Etienne Deguine, Associate Product Manager, Google Translate

]]> https://googledata.org/google-translate/observing-words-in-their-natural-habitat-example-sentences-in-google-translate/feed/ 0 https://googledata.org/google-translate/breaking-down-the-language-barrier-six-years-in-2/ https://googledata.org/google-translate/breaking-down-the-language-barrier-six-years-in-2/#comments Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:01:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=04ee7a625ca694f21ee4c0f92d1fdafc Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.

The rise of the web has brought the world’s collective knowledge to the fingertips of more than two billion people. With just a short query you can access a webpage on a server thousands of miles away in a different country, or read a note from someone halfway around the world. But what happens if it’s in Hindi or Afrikaans or Icelandic, and you speak only English—or vice versa?

In 2001, Google started providing a service that could translate eight languages to and from English. It used what was then state-of-the-art commercial machine translation (MT), but the translation quality wasn’t very good, and it didn’t improve much in those first few years. In 2003, a few Google engineers decided to ramp up the translation quality and tackle more languages. That's when I got involved. I was working as a researcher on DARPA projects looking at a new approach to machine translation—learning from data—which held the promise of much better translation quality. I got a phone call from those Googlers who convinced me (I was skeptical!) that this data-driven approach might work at Google scale.

I joined Google, and we started to retool our translation system toward competing in the NIST Machine Translation Evaluation, a “bake-off” among research institutions and companies to build better machine translation. Google’s massive computing infrastructure and ability to crunch vast sets of web data gave us strong results. This was a major turning point: it underscored how effective the data-driven approach could be.

But at that time our system was too slow to run as a practical service—it took us 40 hours and 1,000 machines to translate 1,000 sentences. So we focused on speed, and a year later our system could translate a sentence in under a second, and with better quality. In early 2006, we rolled out our first languages: Chinese, then Arabic.

We announced our statistical MT approach on April 28, 2006, and in the six years since then we’ve focused primarily on core translation quality and language coverage. We can now translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish, even Esperanto.

Today we have more than 200 million monthly active users on translate.google.com (and even more in other places where you can use Translate, such as Chrome, mobile apps, YouTube, etc.). People also seem eager to access Google Translate on the go (the language barrier is never more acute than when you’re traveling)—we’ve seen our mobile traffic more than quadruple year over year. And our users are truly global: more than 92 percent of our traffic comes from outside the United States.

In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in 1 million books. To put it another way: what all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day. By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate. (We can’t speak for the galaxy; Douglas Adams’s “Babel fish” probably has us beat there.) Of course, for nuanced or mission-critical translations, nothing beats a human translator—and we believe that as machine translation encourages people to speak their own languages more and carry on more global conversations, translation experts will be more crucial than ever.

We imagine a future where anyone in the world can consume and share any information, no matter what language it’s in, and no matter where it pops up. We already provide translation for webpages on the fly as you browse in Chrome, text in mobile photos, YouTube video captions, and speech-to-speech “conversation mode” on smartphones. We want to knock down the language barrier wherever it trips people up, and we can’t wait to see what the next six years will bring.

Posted by Franz Och, Distinguished Research Scientist, Google Translate

]]> https://googledata.org/google-translate/breaking-down-the-language-barrier-six-years-in-2/feed/ 0 https://googledata.org/google-translate/an-easier-way-to-type-in-japanese-vietnamese-and-hebrew/ https://googledata.org/google-translate/an-easier-way-to-type-in-japanese-vietnamese-and-hebrew/#comments Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:30:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=b0d777deda367cdda7612b9b97ae4b12 Knowing what you want to translate is sometimes only half the battle. You may have a letter from your secret admirer sitting in front of you, but if you can’t type the words into Google Translate the meaning can remain elusive.

Typing in languages which use different character sets can be a frustrating problem in computer labs, internet cafés, and sometimes even on home computers if standard Latin alphabet keyboards are the only option available.

To make typing in these languages easier we began including virtual keyboards and transliteration input methods in Google Translate last year, and we’ve been working to expand that support over time. Today we’re happy to announce three major additions to our input methods: Japanese, Vietnamese, and Hebrew language support.

To use transliteration input methods, just select the ‘Allow phonetic typing’ option when typing in Google Translate.
Since releasing transliteration support for these languages a few days ago, we’ve noticed significant improvements in the the speed of input (for instance, Vietnamese text input has become 20% faster with the new input method) which we hope to see translate into a better experience for everyone.

Keep an eye out over the next few months as we add support for more languages.

Would you like to use Google’s transliteration input methods or virtual keyboards across the whole web? Try out our Chrome extension, which includes transliteration for over 20 languages and virtual keyboards for 70 more.

Posted by C. Andrew Warren, Associate Product Manager, Internationalization Team

]]> https://googledata.org/google-translate/an-easier-way-to-type-in-japanese-vietnamese-and-hebrew/feed/ 0 https://googledata.org/google-translate/sometimes-its-easier-just-to-write-it/ https://googledata.org/google-translate/sometimes-its-easier-just-to-write-it/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:32:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=98a5b76c8d59e267f99de3a667bacd38 With our most recent update to Google Translate for Android, we’ve added an experimental new input feature: handwriting on your touchscreen.

Maybe you’d like to see if three 木 make a 森, but you don’t have a Japanese keyboard installed? Just use the handwriting icon

Our goal is to break down the language barrier, all the time, everywhere. By adding handwriting input directly into our Android app we hope to help you get translation done even more quickly and easily. Sometimes you don’t know how to say what you want translated, sometimes you can’t type it, and sometimes it’s easier just to write it. We think of handwriting on the touchscreen as another natural input that you may want to use to complement the keyboard, microphone, or camera.

This is still an experimental feature. It’s available in Chinese and Japanese, and you can enable it for English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish if you like. (We currently only support single-character input for Chinese and Japanese.) Just as with speech recognition and our translations themselves, our handwriting recognition happens in the cloud, allowing us to continually improve accuracy without requiring you to download new versions of the app.

Download Google Translate in Android Market — it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 1.5 and up. Then, you can easily find out whether 自 really means ‘server rack with a Wi-Fi antenna’.

Posted by Daniel Keysers, Software Engineer

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