Work

Google Now Translates Uploaded Documents

By Kevin Purdy on July 10, 2009 at 11:00 PM

Google Translate could previously take pasted text or web URLs for translation, and the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer was offering on-the-fly translation. Now Google’s made it easy to put desktop documents through its multi-language processing.

Hit “Upload a document” on the Translate main page, and you’ll be prompted to upload Word documents, PowerPoint presentation files, PDFs, HTML files or straight-up text files. All of them are transformed into HTML and translated to your language of choice. That means you lose any special formatting, of course, but you get a fairly speedy turn-around to get a grasp on what’s being said in a foreign language file.

Google Translates Documents [Google Operating System]

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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)

  • resource
    July 11, 2009 at 12:42 AM
    Why are all Lifehacker RSS feeds telling me the image is best viewed in a browser? To increase clickthroughs?

    resource

  • lifeh4xor
    July 11, 2009 at 12:36 AM
    Automated translation is only good for trying to figure out what the text means. And even that, yesterday, I used German to English in Google Translate and I could barely understand. Thankfully I knew the topic in depth. Never use it to communicate or try to sell something to a prospective customer. They'll turn their back and run!

    lifeh4xor

  • stumble
    July 11, 2009 at 5:03 AM
    Hmm..was excited to try this on a large Italian document (pdf) I've been wanting to translate but 1) it stops translating at page 36 and 2) all word-wrapped words that are hyphenated in the middle get split into 2 words in the translation...which means gibberish every 10 or so lines. For 1) I could split the pdf into multiple files and translate each one... For 2)...some kind of crazy text-processing that I'm not willing to try to set up.

    stumble

  • psiokinetic
    July 11, 2009 at 12:48 AM
    You could take this and an OCR tool that recognizes foreign languages and give yourself a very rough translation of, say, any Japanese manga you like. Does anyone have any suggestions on an OCR tool that could provide the other half?

    psiokinetic

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