I just came back from Google and they have updated their translation tools.
Less than a month ago the options were English to 10 languages and those same 10 languages back to English. 20 options, and to be honest I was happy with that. I went on the site when I made my widget and we were up to English going into 14 languages and those 14 going back to English, and the occasional second language.
Today I went to the site and it appears that there are 23 languages - 24 if you count the 2 versions of Chinese. There is also the time saving option that they should have as the default “Detect Language”. This means if you are on a site and you have no idea of the language but like the pictures you can tell Google to translate the page even though you don’t know the language. OK, I am a bit too geeky, but this is really cool stuff.
I have a simple testing process to see if something translates and it worked in all the languages so far. Everyone should do this if translating. Take you text and translate it. Then take the tranlsated result and bring it back into your original language.
Translating “what does this do?” English to French results in “qu’est-ce que cela?”
Translating “qu’est-ce que cela?” French to English results in “what is this?”
Translating “What is the purpose of that? ” English to French results in “quel est le but de cela?”
Translating “quel est le but de cela?” French to English results in “What is the purpose of that?”
The difference is important and it is best that you do something link this. If you are using a translation tool for business, translate sentence by sentence, and then the full paragraph. There are times when the tool will change something based on the context of a paragraph.
All things considered, this is a great tool.
The reason this is so important to me is I am building an article directory in French. I want to make sure that I get things right.
BTW, the languages are:
- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hindi
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Russian
- Spanish
- Swedish
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5 responses so far ↓
1 Virtual Assistant Home Business Blog Carnival - Issue 1 « VagabondetteVA // May 11, 2008 at 19:18 pm
[…] Richard McLaughlin of Oh, the Places You’ll Go gives you info on More Widget Building. […]
2
matt (Check me out!)
// May 15, 2008 at 1:16 am
great post. I had never really tried to use too many of their tools. also your test where it didn’t always translate things correctly is good to know.
matts last blog post..MediaTemple GS Customers Beware Site Down for 23 hours
3 Working at Home on the Internet // May 16, 2008 at 13:27 pm
[…] McLaughlin presents More Widget Building posted at Oh, the Places You’ll Go, saying, “try translations of popular pages and then […]
4 Tip Diva | Carnival Of Tips - May 17, 2008 // May 18, 2008 at 14:42 pm
[…] McLaughlin presents More Widget Building posted at Oh, the Places You’ll Go, saying, “add a translation widget for your foreign […]
5 WORDSBlog » Blog Archive » Everyone’s Blog 6 // May 24, 2008 at 16:45 pm
[…] talks about the benefits of having a language interpreting widget. To read this article go to Oh, the Places You’ll Go. David Cassell welcome back. David has an article entitled Impossible Is Nothing. I like […]
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