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This is pretty useful. When you translate a noun, Google Translate now shows the proper definite article. For example, when you translate "person" into Portuguese, Google displays multiple translations: "a pessoa", "o homem", "a mulher" and more. Google actually translates "the person".


When there are too many translations, Google collapses the list.


{ Thanks, Camilo. }

Google Translate supports 9 new languages: Hausa (Nigeria, 35 million speakers), Igbo (Nigeria, 25 million speakers), Yoruba (Nigeria, 28 million speakers), Somali (Somalia, 17 million speakers), Zulu (South Africa, 10 million speakers), Mongolian (Mongolia, China, 6 million speakers), Nepali (Nepal, India, Bhutan 17 million speakers), Punjabi (India, Pakistan, 100 million speakers), Maori (New Zealand, 160,000 speakers). Google Translate now supports 80 languages and that's impressive.


According to Ethnologue, there are 80 languages with more than 10 million native speakers, 200 languages with at least 3 million speakers and 1,300 languages with at least 100,000 speakers. Google Translate supports all the languages with more than 100 million native speakers, 13 of the 16 languages that have between 50 and 100 million speakers, 4 of the 13 languages that have between 30 and 50 million speakers and 15 of the 47 languages that have between 10 and 30 million speakers.

You might remember "Google in Your Language", the Google feature that allowed you to translate Google services. It was a great way to help Google support new languages, but you could also use it to find new Google features.

It looks like the translation console will be back. There's a Google Community Translation page that links to a Chrome extension which is not available.


I searched for the extension ID and found a Chrome log with information about the extension: "Tool for providing translations and corrections for Google products". The name of the extension is "Google in Your Language".


{ Thanks, Florian K. }

Google Translate has a new compact interface that combines the drop-downs that allow you to select the language pairs with the tabs that show the last 3 languages you've selected.


Here's the old interface:


Usually Google does a good job at detecting the language of the original text, so it's a good idea to click "Detect language", unless your text is very short.

{ Thanks, Zachary. }

When you select one the following language pairs in Google Translate: French <-> English or German <-> English, you might see a message at the bottom of the page: "Please help Google Translate improve quality for your language here". The link sends you to a page like this one (French -> English) or this one (German -> English).

It's an interesting way to help Google Translate become more accurate. Here's what you need to do: "In the translated sentence, select the words which mean the highlighted word in the original sentence."



It's likely that all the texts from this experiment are used to train Google Translate and they include professional translations. This might help Google Translate improve the word-level alignment of Google's parallel corpora.

For the English to German pair, you can change the task to "Select all good translations of the following term":

Google+ added translation links for posts and comments written in languages you may not understand. Click "Translate" and Google+ will translate the post and the comments. This only works for public posts and the feature is only available on the desktop Google+ site.


Here's what happens after clicking "Translate":



This feature is not that useful if you use Chrome, since the browser has a built-in translation feature that works in Google+ just like it works for any other site.


"The Google Translate team is always working to make information more accessible to individuals around the world. In Google+ this means bringing people together regardless of their written language, and breaking down language barriers that can limit the exchange of ideas," informs the Google Translate blog.

Google Translate has a new feature called Safe Mode, but it's not clear what it does. It's only for page translation and Google shows the following message: "Translated in Safe Mode. This may cause problems with some websites, especially those that use plugins like Flash. Click here to disable Safe Mode".


Google uses the "sandbox" parameter to enable the Safe Mode, so you can try it by adding "&sandbox=1" to any Google Translate URL. Here's an example for El Pais, a Spanish news site. When using the Safe Mode, the site redirects to the US version, but that doesn't happen when using the regular mode if you're not in the US.

Maybe the Safe Mode is related to this security issue.

Google Translate usually detects the predominant language from a text. For example, an English text that includes a few sentences in German and French will be identified as an English text.

If you use the desktop Chrome in English and you visit an English page with a few comments in other languages, Chrome won't translate the page automatically and it won't show the translation bar. To translate the text that's not in English, right-click the page and select "Translate to English".

Here's an example from YouTube:


... and here's the translated page:


Chrome's translation bar says that the page has been translated from English to English. Amazingly, Google translated the comments in Dutch and Portuguese, while preserving the original English text.

If you use the Google Translate site and enter a multilingual text, Google will only translate the text in the predominant language. The same happens when you translate pages. So why is Chrome's translation smarter? Because it slices the text and translates each slice separately.

Please note that this is not limited to English. It's actually the language used by Chrome's interface, which can be changed in the settings, at least if you use Windows.

Here are some examples you can try in Chrome: a YouTube video with multilingual comments, a Google Groups thread with a short text translated in French and Spanish, a list of press releases in both English and French.

Chrome 28 for Android has a new feature that translates pages automatically. It uses Google Translate and it's similar to the desktop translation feature.

For some reason, Chrome for Android doesn't use the translation settings from the desktop Chrome. They're synced, but the mobile Chrome ignores them. Even if you've asked Chrome in the past to always translate French pages, you'll still see this message: "This page is in Fresch. Translate it to English?" The infobar is placed at the top of the page in the tablet interface and at the bottom of the page in the phone interface.


Google's language detection algorithm is not perfect. If Google didn't detect the language properly, you can tap the corresponding link and choose a different language. You can also pick another language for the translation. After the page is translated, you can check "Always translate [this language]".


After selecting "always translate" and visiting a different page written in the same language, the tablet interface shows an infobar and it quickly disappears. The phone interface shows a persistent infobar and you can tap "more" to disable "always translate". For tablets, you need to quickly tap the infobar and you can disable "always translate".


If you answer "no" two times in a row, you'll see an infobar that lets you choose between "never translate [this language]" and "never translate this site".


Translation settings are not synced in Chrome for Android, not even across mobile devices. If you want to disable the Google Translate integration, go to the Settings page, select "Content settings", then "Google Translate" and turn off this feature.

If you use Google Translate to translate a web page, there's a simple way to get more real estate. To hide the navigation bar and the search box, just the click the arrow button next to: [View: Translation|Original]. It's below the red "sign in" button in the following screenshot:



Of course, you can also use Google Chrome, which has a built-in translation feature.

Google's homepage links to a page that asks Māori speakers to help Google add this language to Google Translate.

"Google Translate is a free automatic language translation service by Google. It works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead. Google Translate currently supports translation between 71 languages. Our team is working on expanding this list and Māori could be one of the next supported languages with your help. If you speak Māori and English, we will greatly appreciate your help with identifying good Māori translations."



Google links to some pages that allow you to rate translation quality. Please don't use this feature if you don't speak Māori.


From Wikipedia: "Māori (...) is the language of the indigenous population of New Zealand, the Māori. It has the status of an official language in New Zealand. (...) According to a 2001 survey on the health of the Māori language, the number of very fluent adult speakers was about 9% of the Māori population, or 29,000 adults. (...) 157,000 New Zealand residents claim they can converse in Māori about everyday things."

"In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is a placeholder text (filler text) commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout, by removing the distraction of meaningful content. The lorem ipsum text is typically a section of a Latin text by Cicero with words altered, added, and removed that make it nonsensical and not proper Latin". (Wikipedia)

What happens when you use Google Translate to find the English translation of one of the many lorem ipsum texts? You get this:


"We will be sure to post a comment. Add tomato sauce, no tank or a traditional or online. Until outdoor environment, and not just any competition, reduce overall pain. Cisco Security, they set up in the throat develop the market beds of Cura; Employment silently churn-class by our union, very beginner himenaeos. Monday gate information. How long before any meaningful development. Until mandatory functional requirements to developers. But across the country in the spotlight in the notebook. The show was shot. Funny lion always feasible, innovative policies hatred assured. Information that is no corporate Japan."

Well, Google Translate for Latin is still in alpha and the text is nonsensical. There are many actual mistakes in Google Translate. Statistical machine translation sometimes produces humorous results.

{ via waxy.org }

Google removed yet another advanced search tool: cross-language search. It was available in the "Search tools" menu as "translated foreign pages" and it allowed you to find pages written in other languages.


Google automatically suggested a few languages for your query, but you could manually add other languages. Your query was translated into all these languages, Google performed multiple searches for the translations, compiled a list of results and translated titles and snippets into your language.

Here's a screenshot from 2009, when Google Search added this feature:


"If you're traveling and want to find hotels, restaurants, activities or reviews written from a local perspective, or if you're just curious to find what's being written about a company, product or topic in another language, give Translated search in the Search Options panel a try," suggested Google at that time.

The feature was first available in 2007 as part of Google Translate, but the initial version supported a single destination language. "Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). If you're looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type 'wine tasting events in Bordeaux' into the search box on the 'Search results' tab on Google Translate. You'll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English," informed Google.

It's sad to see this feature disappear because it was very powerful and difficult to replace. It integrated Google Translate and Google Search, so Google performed multiple translations and searches just to shows you 10 cross-language search results.

Why was it removed? "The translate foreign pages feature is no longer offered. Removing features always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. You can still translate entire pages in Chrome. Streamlining enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people's lives," explained Google. Most likely, not many people used this feature.

I assume that most "search tools" features are rarely used and the same thing is true for other features for power users: advanced search, operators. They're not obvious, they're difficult to use and few people need them. As Google focuses more on answering questions, I expect to see fewer and fewer advanced search features and that's disappointing.