this is the kind of thing that makes me bliss out about working at google. engineers (including one i know, the lovely and delightful sha-mayn) have been working on statistical translation of language pairs and you can see the results at Google Translate. in mid-december, they announced real-time translation in google chat and google talk. it was only today that i realized how unbelievably awesome this is -- they support 23 language pairs and, in chinese at least, the translations are incredibly idiomatic and polite. it works by inviting a translation bot to your chat, so it's as if you have a virtual translator in the room with you -- a really neat and elegant approach, i think, though it does make for inherently amusing chats since the translations aren't always spot on:
me: this also does FRENCH!!!GTranslate: 这也不代表法语！
full instructions and a list of language pairs is available in the google talk blog announcement about it.
1 comment:
I like that it translated "the chinese" as "the chinese people." I often do not understand the chinese people.
Post a Comment