Google have just released a new feature for it’s Translate service – translate as you type.
In a move that must be closely linked with a similar upcoming feature for Google Wave as well as the enevitable shift to real time search. The Mountain View outfit have raised the bar once again in the online translation market with this seamless and slick new functionality.
By entering a word, phrase or paragraph, the service translates and displays 
the result word by word in smooth fashion, nothing more than you’d expect from Google. With 51 languages available, they’ve also released a function with the ability to read and write any language by romanizing a translation.
Another feature, text to speech sees translations that are into English audible which rounds off an impressive update for the service which steamed ahead of competition with recent updates including a on site translation toolbar.
One of the features mentioned at Google Wave’s IO Developers conference back in May was the same word by word translation facility that they have released today and this is surely a sign that we’ll soon this feature there too. Check out a video with all the new features below:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FijOWfO3Frk&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
It’s becoming clearer that Google is edging towards real time search with this update, with the likes of Google Wave and Twitter creating content quicker and more often than ever, the necessity to provide relevant and up to date search results is becoming harder by the day with the current format.
Google introduced Search Options to help users organise results to suit their needs more though indexing the web on such a regular basis to create real time search is the hardest barrier to overcome.
Their evidently continuing to learn about ways in which real time features can be applied to their products and services and see it as the next logical step from a user experience point of view as well as deeper objectives with the aforementioned desire for real time search.
honestly besides news who cares..99% of the stuff people tweet about is useless crap..other than large events it matters little.. this is better than twitter…
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If only they’d add a back translation as well, so as you type in your source language, you see the destination language and also see what happens when you take the translated text and re-translate it into the source – then you’d have some idea of whether your point is being made clearly enough or if you need to rephrase your source text.
maybe we’ll bridge the language barrier
I was playing around with the real-time translation and entered “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” The Spanish translation came out as “La cigüeña tocaba el saxofón detrás del palenque de paja.” which looked a little weird. Translating back to English, the result is “The stork played the saxophone behind the lazy dog.” Absolutely hilarious, thank you Google!
The results that “johnsantic” reports are an example of why backtranslation should be built in.
Google’s translation skills are coming on every year and are just getting better and better. The way Google interacts with languages and spoken audio in 2011 is absolutely fantastic!
Skeleton Productions.