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Home | Internet | Tools And Resources | Search Engines

Free Language Translations From Search Engines

By: Chris Sandberg

Millions of people access the internet everyday, looking for several things online like answers to their homework, movie reviews, book plots, political news, celebrity gossips, travel suggestions. And when they enter their queries to the search engines, most of the web pages that are pulled up have contents written in English.

However, not all internet users are that well-versed in English despite the fact that it is the universal language. For example, users from China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Germany; which are just some of the countries that are in the past were not influenced by the English-speaking population. Hence, a lot of resourceful websites become incomprehensible or become less valuable to users from these parts of the world.

There are also web pages though from non-English speakers that could also be valuable resources to users that don't speak the language. For example, web pages in that contains the latest news from South East Asian countries, Middle Eastern countries, or South American countries. Most of these current event web pages are published in the local language, unless written by reporters from international news wire agencies.

Because of this language barrier, search engines were inspired to offer free language translation services to their users. Yahoo! Search has Babel Fish; Live Search has Windows Live Translator; and Google has Google Translate.

Babel Fish and Windows Live use the translation paradigm from SYSTRANS, one of the oldest machine translation companies. Babel Fish and Windows Live can translate English texts to up to 12 languages including: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Then some of these languages can be translated back to English.

Google Translate on the other hand uses their own statistical translation. They store billions of words, phrases, and sentences to their computers. These texts are aligned with human translations. Once stored in their computer, Google applies statistical learning techniques to build a translation style.

Google can translate English to 33 languages including those that are already mentioned above and these languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Filipino, Finish, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. Translation between any of these languages is also possible, but the accuracy depends on the stored data in Google's computers.

In using these translation tools, users just have to copy a foreign text from a web page or a document and paste it inside the translation box. He will then choose from what language the text is written, and to what language it will be translated. In just a few seconds, the translated text will be provided. Users can also provide the URL of the web page, and the whole page will be translated.

Because of these machine translation applications, users worldwide can easily browse web pages and grasp ideas of the incomprehensible contents from the translated texts. However, even if these web-based translation services are free and provides convenience to internet users, the translated texts that are produced by these tools are not perfect. It is still best to get professional human translation services.

Article Source: http://bytepowered.org/articles

Chris is the editor of gfanatic.com, a Google fan blog that features tips and updates on different Google products and services like the Google translator.

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