Google’s latest tweaks to its Google Docs include the ability to automatically translate documents using Google Translate and some enhancements to drawing tools to make it easier to zoom onto objects and construct shapes. More »
Google’s web apps can translate uploaded Microsoft Office documents, but with many caveats involving file sizes and HTML formatting. DocTranslator, a Java-powered web app, runs your Office and text documents through Google Translate and sends them back with the same formatting. More »
Language translation site Nice Translator uses Google Translate’s results but wraps them in a more dynamic front end that offers multiple translations as-you-type. Type your phrase into Nice Translator, which auto-detects what language you’re inputting, and watch as it lists multiple translations, in real-time, as you type. Google Translate’s page isn’t as nice-looking or dynamic as Nice Translator, since it requires you to choose both the original and translation language and manually refresh the page. For more language fun, check out the best online language tools for word nerds. Nice Translator [via Webware]
Google Translate has increased its range with the recent addition of 11 new languages. Of particular note for Australian travellers are three widely-used languages from this corner of the world: Filipino, Indonesian and Vietnamese. While this kind of machine translation is still fairly rough, it can help get the gist of text when you’re checking out (say) the site for an unfamiliar hotel. Google Translate
Need a quick translation of a word into English? Type ‘translate’ followed by the word into Google’s search box and it will now look the English translation for you straight away. While this doesn’t offer the range of language pairs found in Google Translate, it’s a quick fix for getting a translation from commonly encountered languages into English (currently, it covers French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinses, Hindi, Italian, Korean and Portugese, though only into English from those languages). [Google via Google Operating System]
In addition to its new ability to automatically detect what language you’re trying to translate, Google Translate adds 10 more languages to its capabilities: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, and Swedish.
