Google Translate - now with Pinyin!

The latest update in Google Translate looks really cool! It now not just gives the pronunciation but also romanisation for Chinese and a few other non-Roman based languages: Japanese, Korean, Thai, Russian, Greek, Hindi, etc. Arabic and Hebrew are not romanised but Hebrew is often given with short vowels.

Google Translate

As any online translator, it will have all the flaws but I have been using for quite some time and I notice that it gets better and better.

The pinyin will appear for the main entry (not alternatives) when the translation is from English into Chinese.

It is another tool to learn Chinese and other languages.

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Some transliteration features may not be stable or consistent for some languages. They are may be still tweaking it. Sometimes they show transliteration for one direction, not the other.

The page sends the browswer into a redirect/resubmit loop. I'm guessing that only happens for IE6 users.

I thinks it's polling and refreshing. It seems you don't have to press the "Translate" button, it starts translating before you click anything. I tested on my MS IE 7.0 and it works fine.

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EDIT:

I normally use Mozilla Firefox, no issue there, see the next post.

Works fine with Firefox. I played around with it for a while and it looks good; in any case the best translating software i've seen so far. It translated "you" with the formal version, 您, but was kind enough to bold it in order to draw the user's attention to a possible incorrect use. Then i also threw in some literary sentences but there, as one would expect, it fell flat. Still, this seems a nice resource to add to the tool-box. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, Atitarev.

It's working for me now. I like the design. To translate a webpage you enter the URL in the same text field.

They need to work on erhua. I'm learning some erhua words with anki, and the plugin pulls words not in its dictionary from google translate, and I get translations like "dull children 没趣儿“ or "riverside children 河沿儿" all the time. And sometimes "abuse", they translate 水牛儿 as "buffalo abuse" WTH ?

Cool. Thanks for posting.

Pinyin in Google Translate is far from perfect, so are the translations. I find it really useful because I am not quite a beginner and I can find different combinations to find what I need, besides, there's Perapera-kun plug-in and other tools, I've got Wenlin. I feel well equipped.

Here's an article in the New York Times on Google Translate (not specifically related to Chinese):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/technology/09translate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

My two money quotes:

Automated translation systems are far from perfect, and even Google’s will not put human translators out of a job anytime soon. Experts say it is exceedingly difficult for a computer to break a sentence into parts, then translate and reassemble them.

Otherwise it would be sad, what with so many people here spending years to study Chinese

While many translation systems like Google’s use up to a billion words of text to create a model of a language, Google went much bigger: a few hundred billion English words. “The models become better and better the more text you process,” Mr. Och said.

Now that's what I call a corpus

Ok...let's try it out.

When did the bright moon appear? I lift my wine and question the grue sky.

Shénme shíhou chūxiàn de míngyuè?Běnrén jiěchú wǒ de jiǔ hé wèntí gé lǚ āi tiānkōng.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

布法罗水牛水牛水牛水牛水牛水牛水牛

Needs fixin'

But I'm really impressed with the translations. With simple sentences. the translations are almost always understandable, and even grammatically correct in most cases. The results are even better for languages that are linguistically close, like English and Norwegian.

Awesome!