Google Docs Automatically Translates Documents Into 42 Languages
While most of us don’t frequently find ourselves needing to translate our documents to various languages on-the-fly, Google Docs just announced a new feature that’ll be great for those who do: The service now automatically translates docs in 42 different languages with a few mouse clicks.
Translating docs is a breeze: Just hit up the Tools menu, select Translate document, then choose the language you want to translate to. Docs will open the translated document in a new window, then offer to replace the original document with the translation or copy the translation to a new document. It’s probably not for everyone, but it’s a nice feature, nonetheless, and yet another example of Google’s continued march toward integrating its various services.
Translate documents: sharing across languages and generations [Official Google Blog]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
@xamenek: Translator for a living here... you are right when you say : "As a bilingual speaker, I gotta admit this tool is better than nothing, but not by much."
Languages are so complex... (type of text, regional expressions -idioms-, etc). A tool can't capture the essence of a text.
I use the tool sometimes to "rough out" a glossary. A very few times, it gave pretty good results, but most times, it's pretty bad. I have tried pretty much all the combinations of English-French-German and Greek. German is especially brutal!
They should add fun translations like Pig-Latin and Klingon.
You know, honestly, in the category of "doing nice things for me that I like, even though I didn't really ask for them".......Google is like *this* close to passing my grandmother.
Though, in her defense, she did die several years ago.
As a bilingual speaker, I gotta admit this tool is better than nothing, but not by much.
When you speak a foreign language, you gotta realise there are subtleties that any automated program, no matter how good, cannot transcribe, for example sometimes you cannot express the exact same idea so you'll have to use an aproximation.
And when you think about the fact that European languages are latin-based, imagine what kind of translation would come out if you wanted to translate something in, let's say, arabic, mandarin or japanese.
In fact a couple of years back the french government wanted to promote massively the use of automated translators by voting a law; so a group of official translators sent them two copies of a letter that was in french and english, only the second one had been translated using google software.
The second copy was of course hilarious, and no one ever talked about that project anymore.
@danger the pirate (silver star edition): I'm sure the answer to that question entirely depends on what language the documents starts off as and what language you want to translate it to.
However, I suppose a simple test would be to get a document written in a foreign language along with an accurate translation to English and then run it through Google Doc's translation feature.
Naame
I tested it. Though it's not 100% accurate, it's pretty good, especially since it's free! I translated two Word documents from English to French, a long one (my resume) and a small one. For the most part, it translated both documents well but I had to edit both semantically and also with its choice of words.
masteryayi
@danger the pirate (silver star edition): This. It's great that Google Docs has this feature, but if it is only decent, or just good but not great, then who really cares?
What were your findings past, "OMG GOOGLE TRANSLATOR LOLOLOLOL!!11!!!", Adam?
angelzero
but how good is it? ive always wondered about the quality of googles translator, but dont know another language to test it.