New Google Translate With Instant Results: Not That Great With Indian Languages
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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After informing you about the grand announcements made by Google last week, here comes another product from the Google factory, only this time its an improvement over its previous edition. Google recently launched a new look Google Translate with a few additional features. But again I guess Google has still not been able to decipher the Indian Grammatical Code and hence even the new improvised version has not much of a support for Hindi to English translation or Vice-Versa.
Google Translate is available in 51 languages which according to Google covers 98% of all internet users. This implies Google Translate can process 2550 permutations (each language being paired with each one of other 50 languages as Original and Translated).
Though the program is great for individual short sentences or words, there is still a lot to be developed in order to have even 70% accurate (by accuracy I mean grammatical) text as compared to its original. Nonetheless, the program is more or less one of a kind right now and hence, helpful. We will look at the faults after going through the newly added features.
New Features
1. Instantaneous Translate:
If you have used the previous version, you may remember that, to translate something, you had to enter the text in the box and press the ‘Translate’ button to get it translated. The latest version translates the sentence as soon as you press the space bar after each word, in real time just below the text. This is a nice thought as it eliminates the irritating part of pressing the ‘Translate’ button again and again, but still I would not term it as a great improvement.
Thinking rationally, I would rate this feature rather low at 6/10, as it doesn’t improve my basic necessity of using Google Translate. Press the button or not, I would anyways use Google Translate if I need to translate any document urgently.
2. Read and write any Language:
In one word Real time transliteration (not to be confused with translation). That means even if you don’t know the characters in a particular language, you can type the required data phonetically in English. It will transliterate in real time, for you to correct it if necessary (remember Language feature in Orkut). This is a very important improvement enabling people to use the normal QWERTY keyboard even if they want to translate something from a vernacular language and don’t have the corresponding keyboards with them.
In the reverse direction. If you are translating something from English to some other language, but don’t know how to read the new language, you get an option of ‘Romanization’ (The English Script), which gives you the phonetic version of the translated data. Again an important aspect, as this helps people from one country to communicate in their non-native language. If you know the sound of corresponding text its very simple for you to pronounce it and explain it to someone who doesn’t understand any other language except that. I would rate it at 9/10.
3. Text-to-speech:
When translating into English, you can now also hear translations in spoken form by clicking the Speaker Icon, besides the translated version. This feature is again helpful to the people who don’t speak English as their native language for obvious reasons. This feature is currently only for reading anything written in Roman script. I hope Text-to-Speech support for other scripts is in pipeline. I would rate it at 7/10 as it isn’t as important, for anyone looking to translate anything but still a good improvement as compared to the last version.
Coming to Grammatical problems I mentioned earlier, I would like to present 3 examples of translation I tried(Read them, they are awesome fun). To tell you, I was literally ROTFL while I was doing this Monkey Business.
As you can clearly see, the translated version is totally different from what it is supposed to mean. Also there are lots of grammatical errors. Google needs to develop a code to account for the difference in sentence construction in Hindi and English, for Google Translate to get more authentic. If Google is successful in making even 70-80% of the Input passage sound logical, in my opinion there job is done. If someone at Google is reading this, I would like to mention that I’m a great fan of Google products, but I just hope the concerns that I have raised are taken sportingly, and help Google stand by its reputation as the company which always delivers the best.
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Great research dude. Thanks.
Great research indeed in the right direction.
I have to work hard to make it proper translation.
Thanks