translation

Google's expertise in translation has begun to pay dividends for an entirely separate project, its Chrome browser--as well as any other software using the open-source spell-checking package called Hunspell.

Chrome combines WebKit's spell-check infrastructure with Hunspell's multilanguage library of correctly spelled words to supply spell-check in 27 languages. But many widely used words were missing from Hunspell, and Google used its translation expertise to fill in the gaps.

Here's the explanation in a Wednesday blog post from Google programmers Brett Wilson and Siddhartha Chattopadhyay:

"The Hunspell dictionary maintainers have done a great job creating … Read more

For Senior Editors Bonnie Cha and Kent German, Future Apps' new language program for the iPhone and iPod Touch may be just the thing to get them around Barcelona next week as they attend the GSMA Mobile World Congress in that famed Spanish city.

iSpeak is a set of translation apps that can convert words and sentences from English to another language, or vice versa. You type your phrase into the app, which quickly translates your text. If you're not sure how to pronounce the phrase, pressing a button triggers the app to speak the words aloud. iSpeak got … Read more

Google has brought seven new languages to its Google Translate service. According to the company, Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Hungarian, Maltese, Thai, and Turkish have been added. The company also announced that its English dictionary has been improved to "include synonyms, antonyms, pronunciations, detailed definitions, and examples from Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary." All its new features are available now.

User Centric, a company that researches user experiences, announced Monday that it has concluded its usability study of Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. According to its findings, which took opinions from 30 participants who were asked to … Read more

The total number of online Chinese citizens has grown to approximately 298 million, reports the BBC. According to the report, which cites data from the China Internet Network Information Center, there has been a significant increase in the number of people who use mobile phones accessing the Web, which led to a 41.9 percent increase in China's Internet population year over year. Although there are almost as many people on the Web in China as there are U.S. residents, the country has a long way to go to match Web penetration rates measured in other countries: Web … Read more

Google has begun experimenting with a new cross-language ability for its Search Appliance, a server customers can use to power their in-house search service.

"Many of our enterprise search customers have dozens of offices all over the world with tens of millions documents indexed in a host of different languages," said Cyrus Mistry, Google's enterprise product manager, in a blog post Thursday. "Cross-Language Enterprise Search instantly translates your Google Search Appliance query from one language to one or more other languages using Google's best-in-class translation engine."

Existing customers can try the feature by downloading it … Read more

If you like Google's translate service but want something that can do the same phrase in multiple languages at once and in real time, the Nice Translator is worth checking out.

This simple application uses Google Translate to do the heavy lifting. It lets users type in any phrase, in any language, then translates it into one of the other 34 available languages as they type.

The site works fairly well on mobile devices, including the iPhone, though not as well as Google's own mobile-translation page despite its one-language-at-a-time limitation.

[via FriendFeed]

I fear I'm going to be wasting a lot more time in the blogosphere now.

Google Reader is now automatically translating RSS feeds. It's easy to use too. You just subscribe to a feed in any language and when it appears in your Google Reader you click on the "Feed Settings" tab on the top of the feed and then click "translate into my language." Presto! The feed becomes English.

The translation seemed pretty good on the Spanish-language blog I experimented with. You could tell it was machine translation but it was very readable. … Read more

Over the weekend, YouTube introduced a new feature to help make captioned or subtitled videos more accessible to international users. The new system uses machine translation to convert any of these videos into your language of choice in real time.

To access this feature, users simply need to turn it on from the lower-right corner of the player. From there, they can use a simple drop-down menu to pick which language into which they want the video translated. Unfortunately, YouTube won't remember a user's translation choices from one video to the next, but this seems like a feature … Read more

You may have noticed a trend in my iPhone apps of the week posts: I mostly download games. To offer a little balance to my posts, this week I have a couple of useful iPhone apps that aren't just for when you want to waste some time. Both are free so you can take advantage of these useful tools right away.

Free Translator is a language translator that lets you send e-mails in different languages. The concept is fairly simple: choose a source language, choose a target language, and then hit translate. When you're finished, you can send … Read more