Google is working on a major new Chrome feature, one that would translate text directly within pictures and images.
Chrome already has robust translations abilities, but that only works with standard text. The translation doesn’t work when the text is part of an image, unless you perform a Google image search. According to Chrome researcher Leopeva64, Google is working to overcome that hurdle.
If Google is successful, the feature would be big step forward for translation services.
In the battle for the videoconferencing market, Cisco has announced that WebEx will be gaining live translation for more than 100 languages.
Zoom may have become the poster child for pandemic-based videoconferencing, but WebEx remains a popular choice, especially among businesses, thanks to its blend of features, price and security. Like Zoom, Teams and others, WebEx has continued to evolve and add features customers need, especially as a result of the current state of remote work.
In one of its biggest additions, available for testing later this month, Cisco is adding live translation for more than 100 languages.
In late March, Webex will begin a trial of real-time translation – from English to 100+ languages (note not all dialects included in translations). That means, non-native English speakers and/or hearing-impaired participants can choose closed captioning translation from English to one of the 108 additional languages supported from Afrikaans to Zulu. Real-time translation aids understanding and creates a more inclusive meeting, where language no longer be a barrier to great collaboration.
The feature will likely help WebEx make inroads in multi-language teams, providing an effective way to communicate without purchasing expensive, third-party translation services.
The feature is expected to be generally available in May.
Facebook is reportedly testing a new feature that could help Pages get messages read (and engaged with) by more people.
According to TheNextWeb, the feature lets Page managers write multiple versions of a post in different languages. Facebook will then display the most relevant version to users based on their own settings.
Page admins can even add a new language version of a post that has already been posted.
There’s no word on if this might roll out to all pages, but it seems like the type of feature that would prove useful enough on a broad scale to warrant a full roll-out.
As TNW notes, there is already a feature that lets users have posts translated for them, but this gives the Page the ability to make sure the right language gets in front of the user in the first place, and that means these messages are more likely to be accurate (assuming the author understands the languages they’re using).
This is just one of multiple new page features Facebook has been testing lately.
Image via Facebook
Google Translate is a pretty magical app. I think we can say that without equivocation. Google recently added the ability to point and shoot words and have them instantly translated – and the darndest thing is that it actually works. Google Translate also improved its real-time conversation feature and added support for more languages. Basically, the Google Translate app is a must-have for travelers, people learning a new language …
And dads. Don’t forget about dads.
That word you’re hearing is “kippennueker”, a Dutch word that Google Translate will tell you means “chickens fucker”. That’s pretty accurate, as the phrase literally means committing acts of sodomy with a chicken. In actual practice, however, kippennueker is used to describe a stupid, fussy, or otherwise terrible person.
Congrats, Google Translate. Also, congrats dads. Never change.
Google announced the addition of ten new languages to Google Translate. A year ago, the company announced that it had reached the 80-language milestone. Now, it’s up to 90.
The new languages are: Chichewa (Chinyanja), Malagasy, Sesotho, Malayalam (മലയാളം), Myanmar (Burmese, မြန်မာစာ), Sinhala (සිංහල), Sundanese (Basa Sunda), Kazakh (Қазақ тілі), Tajik (Тоҷикӣ), and Uzbek (Oʻzbek tili).
“These 10 new languages will allow more than 200 million additional people to translate text to and from their native languages,” says the Google Translate engineering team.
Back in the summer, Google launched its Translate Community aimed at helping the company improve its translation quality for the languages it already supported, as well as contribute to additional languages. Clearly that initiative has paid off.
“If it weren’t for the active Translate Community participation, we wouldn’t be able to launch some of these languages today,” Google says. “While our translation system learns from translated data found on the web, sometimes we need support from humans to improve our algorithms. We’re very grateful for all the support we’re getting today and we hope that together with our community, we can continue improving translation quality for the languages we support today and add even more languages in the future.
The new languages are now available on translate.google.com, and will hit the mobile apps and built-in translation functionality in Chrome soon.
Image via Google
About a year ago, Twitter began offering instant tweet translations, powered by Bing. As with any basic translation tool, it wasn’t always the most accurate thing around, but it worked in many instances.
And now it’s gone. There are tweets from people complaining about the lack of the Bing translate going as far back as August 2nd, so it appears that Twitter quietly phased out the feature.
The bing translate button came and went. Now I haz te go back to old time consuming way to read tweets in some other languages. @Twitter 🙁
— R U Stalkingme? (@2complex2know) August 2, 2014
Did the bing translate tweet feature get taken away from twitter? Or just me?
— Adam Elmakias (@elmakias) August 4, 2014
We confirmed, through searches for tweets in various languages, that the Bing translation feature is nowhere to be found on desktop or mobile.
Going forward, it’s unlikely that Twitter would be content to exist without some sort of translation feature. Twitter is too global, and the way news and trends are spread across the social landscape pretty much demands some basic sort of translation. Maybe they removed Bing translate because they were unsatisfied with its performance (it had a tendency to do some weird things). Maybe they’re just making it better, and will relaunch it at some point.
Or maybe Twitter is moving away from Bing as its translation source. Bing and Twitter have had a solid search partnership for nearly five years – one they continue to expand – so it’s not like Twitter and Bing are on the outs or anything.
Yelp announced the launch of automated review translation in its iPhone app. They offer reviews in fifteen languages in 27 countries. As the company continues to expand internationally, this will only become more important.
The app makes use of Bing Translator (you didn’t think they were going to go with Google, did you?), and lets you tap to translate a single review or all reviews.
“Although machine-translation is not perfect, it’s a fantastic resource for understanding the overall meaning and context of a review that would otherwise be unavailable to a Yelper who does not speak that language,” says Yelp international product manager Stepanie T. “Use this feature to get a general idea of a reviewer’s experience, but understand that some details may be lost in translation.”
“Yelp has always given both locals and travelers alike the ability to find the best hidden gems through the knowledge of the Yelp global community, and mobile review translation makes that even easier,’ she adds. “This tool also gives local businesses that are a bit off the beaten path a better chance to be discovered by travelers. Sounds like a win-win situation to us!”
Yelp supports English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, French, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, and Japanese.The translation feature will come to its Android app soon.
Image via Yelp
Google just announced the launch of a new Translate Community aimed at helping the company improve its translation quality for the 80 languages it already supports.
The community is aimed at multi-lingual language enthusiasts, who will also be tasked with helping Google launch in additional languages.
“In the new community, you’ll find options to help with a variety of things, including generating new translations and rating existing ones,” says Google Translate program manager Sveta Kelman. “Over time, you’ll find more ways to contribute, as well as get more visibility into the impact of your contributions and the activity across the community. We will also localize Community pages to support your preferred display language. If you have feedback and ideas about improving and growing our community, we’d love to hear it so please don’t hesitate to submit it via “Send feedback” link on the bottom of the page.”
Translate Community will also give people who don’t necessarily want to volunteer their time to dedicate to the cause a place to let the team know about problems they encounter while using Google’s products.
Users can click an “Improve this translation” button, and then “Contribute” to submit a suggestion. It will incorporate corrections over time.
Image via Google
There’s no denying that Microsoft’s Skype has played a huge part in international communication, as it’s one of the most popular ways for person A to see and hear person B across the globe.
Of course, person A and person B often speak a different language, which can obviously hamper communication. In order make Skype even more useful, Microsoft says that it will soon have real-time voice and text translation baked right in.
“Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams,” says Gurdeep Pall, Corporate Vice President of Skype and Lync at Microsoft. “In our industry, we often talk about pursuing big, bold dreams, and of how we’re limited only by the power of our imaginations. Skype Translator is one of those endeavors.”
Microsoft demoed the new technology at the inaugural CODE conference in California this week. Check out Pall having a translated conversation with a German colleague via Skype. As you’ll see, Skype’s new translation feature took Pall’s voice and translated it into both German text and German voice, and then did the same for his German colleague’s speech.
A few hiccups, sure, but overall the translation fostered an understandable conversation. Thought Microsoft says that we are in the early days of this technology, they have given a launch date for the Skype Translator Windows 8 beta app–the end of this year.
Image via Official Microsoft Blog
Google Translate has hit the 80 languages milestone, as Google announced the addition of support for nine more languages.
“Whether you’re trekking to a new place or simply trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t share a language with you, Google Translate can help you connect to new information and people,” says software engineer Arne Mauser. “Today, we’re launching 9 new languages that span Africa, Asia, and Oceania and have over 200 million native speakers, collectively.”
These languages would be: Hausa (Harshen Hausa), Igbo (Asụsụ Igbo), Yoruba (èdè Yorùbá), Somali (Af-Soomaali), Zulu (isiZulu), Mongolian (Монгол хэл), Nepali (नेपाली), Punjabi language (ਪੰਜਾਬੀ) (Gurmukhi script) and Maori (Te Reo Māori).
The first three are major languages of Nigeria. Somali is spoken in Somalia as well as other countries around the Horn of Africa, and has 17 million native speakers. Zulu is spoken in South Africa as well as other south-western African countries with 10 million native speakers.
In Asia, Mongolian is spoken in Mongolia in addition to parts of China, and has 6 million native speakers. Nepali is poken in Nepal as well as India, and has 17 million native speakers. Punjabi is spoken in India and Pakistan, and has 100 million native speakers.
Maori is spoken in New Zealand with 160 thousand speakers. Support for this language was made possible by a volunteer effort.
Earlier this year, Google added Bosnian, Cebuano, Hmong, Javanese and Marathi. You can see all supported languages here.
Image: Google
Last week, Pinterest announced its launch in Japan after previously launching in the UK, France and Italy. The company has since announced its launch in the Nordics.
“For the past month, we’ve worked alongside our community to translate Pinterest in more languages around the world,” said Pinterest localization manager Silvia Oviedo-Lopez. “Thanks to the efforts of Pinners in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, Pinterest is now available in these Nordic languages. The Finnish site was translated in four days, while the others took just a couple weeks.
“The response from local Pinners was amazing, from start to finish,” added Lopez. “People were eager to figure out the best terminology for Pinterest, and we got help from folks all over…”
As Pinterest expands geographically, so does it digitally. Last week, the company launched its first API, and partnered with a bunch of brands to surface more content from Pinterest on third-party sites.
News also came out late last week, that Pinterest is working on getting into the travel business, partnering with other sites with the goal of helping users book vacations.
If those efforts take off, it will do Pinterest well to be translated into as many languages as possible for sure.
Image: Pinterest
![Etsy Starts Taking Translation Seriously [Updated]](https://dev.webpronews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/pexels-tima-miroshnichenko-5380664-80x75.jpg)
Update: If comments from Etsy users are any indication, Etsy is perhaps not taking translation as seriously as it ought to be (See comments at end of article).
Etsy announced on Tuesday that it has added millions of local language listings in French, German, Italian, and Spanish-speaking countries. This is a major effort in the company’s international expansion.
While Etsy is already selling merchandise in 200 countries, and has had the site translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian, until now, most of the listings still only appeared in English. You can see why this might have been a problem for users speaking these other languages trying to search for items to buy.
Etsy is rolling out automatic translation of all sellers’ listings into English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and is making them available in local language searches. Obviously this means a great deal more potential for selling items as well.
“The result is a dramatic increase in the listings that appear in these local languages — in some cases, up from thousands to millions of listings,” says Etsy’s Brittany Williams. “This is a huge opportunity for increased sales to buyers around the world looking for the unique, one-of-a-kind items found on Etsy, who may have been stumped previously by English-only listings. Note: You need to support shipping to these markets in order for your listings to show up in local search results.”
Etsy says that if you’re already doing your own translations, you should continue to do so, but for those who aren’t, the company’s efforts should help a great deal.
The new translations also apply to listings on Google Shopping and its product listing ads (which Etsy sayshas been a huge source of traffic).
“Since we launched GPLA, they’ve generated over 73 million visits and have become an increasingly important source of site traffic, including many new visitors to Etsy,” says Williams. “We’ll begin with GPLA in French and German and will be launching them soon in Spanish and Italian. We hope this will drive additional holiday traffic to your shops, especially from new customers!”
Finally, the company is launching a tool for sellers that lets them translate on-site messages to and from buyers and a world map view and ship-to suggestions in Shop Stats.
Image: Etsy
Google has just announced that they are beginning to roll out a new native translation feature inside Google+.
With Google Translate inside Google+, you’ll see a “Translate” link directly underneath any text that’s in a foreign language. Simply click the link and watch the text translated in-line, and click again to return to the original text.
“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,” says Google’s Ed Chi.
As you may recall, Google launched a Chrome extension that let you translate any post of comment into 50 different languages back in 2011. Apparently, Google’s just going to let that extension waste away now that it’s unnecessary.
“I believe the chrome extension is still working, but it probably won’t get maintained and will probably deprecate soon,” says Chi.
Chi suggests that the translate function could come to mobile in the future, but stopped shy of saying it was a definite thing. He says that nearly all Google+ users should see the new translate function within the next 2 days.
This gets Google+ up the speed with Facebook, who’s used Bing-powered in-line translations for a few years. A couple of months ago, Twitter began testing Bing translations as well.
Facebook has just announced that they have acquired Mobile Technologies, a language software developer who is best known as the makers of the Jibbigo app.
Mobile Technologies’ team will head to Menlo Park to join Facebook’s engineering team.
“I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, a company with an amazing team that’s behind some of the world’s leading speech recognition and machine translation technology. With this deal we will welcome some of the industry’s most talented people to our engineering teams in Menlo Park, California,” said Facebook’s Director of Product Management Tom Stocky in a post.
“It has always been our mission to make the world more open and connected. Although more than a billion people around the world already use Facebook every month, we are always looking for ways to help connect the rest of the world as well. Voice technology has become an increasingly important way for people to navigate mobile devices and the web, and this technology will help us evolve our products to match that evolution. We believe this acquisition is an investment in our long-term product roadmap as we continue towards our company’s mission.”
Mobile Technologies was founded back in 2001, and they launched the popular Jibbigo app in 2009. Jibbigo allows users to say a phrase in one language and have in translated (and read back to them) in another language. Jibbigo has the distinction of being the first offline speech translation app. As of today, Jibbigo supports English, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Thai, and Traditional Chinese.
“Facebook, with its mission to make the world more open and connected, provides the perfect platform to apply our technology at a truly global scale. We look forward to continuing to develop our technology at Facebook and finding new and interesting ways to apply it to Facebook’s long-term product roadmap,” said Jibbigo in a statement. “We’re excited about the opportunities ahead and the opportunity to take the dream of a world without language barriers to yet another level.”
It’s obvious that this acquisition could help Facebook get much better at translation – especially any language challenges that pop up concerning future voice search, or dictation. It could make it easier for users of different languages to read each other’s posts, or to chat. As of now, Facebook’s translation is powered by Bing – but this makes it seem like Facebook is at least considering brining translation services under its own umbrella.
A recent study from an online translation firm, determined that most applications developed anywhere in the world are written in English even when the developers are not from English speaking countries. 40% of the surveyed translations were general business applications, 30% were games (excluding gambling), and the remaining 30% were applications from different categories.
App developers generally cater to specific markets, so they translate their applications into the main languages of their target market. For instance, developers targeting the South American market (about 40% of the translated applications) translate their applications into Latin America Spanish and to Brazilian Portuguese. Developers targeting the European market (35% of the translated applications) translate their applications into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Russian. Applications targeted at East Asian markets (about 20% of the applications) are translated into Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hindi. Finally, about 15% of applications are translated into Scandinavian languages including Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish.
Other markets, such as the huge market of Arabic speakers, are still untapped by application developers, mainly because the business potential in these markets is low, despite the enormous number of potential users. Some languages, like Arabic or Hebrew, require adapting the application to display right-to-left text, and this requirement, which entails more development time and higher costs, discourages many application developers.
Google recently selected One Hour Translation as a translation provider for the Android applications market. According to the company’s VP of Marketing, Mr. Yaron Kaufman, “43% of the successful applications are translated into additional languages, besides English.”
The group found that translating applications into leading languages leads to a five-fold increase in the number of users and purchases. They have found that for most developers, application translation is one of the simplest and most inexpensive ways to raise the number of users and to boost purchases. It makes more sense to put outsourced effort into putting an application already on the market into other languages than to build a new app.
Twitter is currently testing a new auto-translate feature for tweets on the Twitter desktop site, and it’s powered by Bing.
The new translations appear directly under the original tweets, and they note the language in which the translation derives. The translations are only appearing for some Twitter users. Bing has yet to make any announcement, but Twitter has confirmed that they are testing the feature.
“To make it easier for people around the world to connect with each other, we are beginning to experiment with Tweet text translation,” says a Twitter spokesperson.
Here’s what the new Bing-powered translation looks like (screenshot via The Verge):
Of course, Twitter wouldn’t be the first major social network to offer Bing-powered translations. Facebook began offering Bing translations almost two years ago.
Earlier this month, Microsoft launched Bing Translator for Windows.
Back at the end of April, Mars: War Logs was released on PC to mediocre reviews. Critics praised the action RPG’s setting, ideas, and the ambition of developer Spiders, but also panned the game for a poor translation and story issues.
In an unusual move, Spiders and publisher Focus Home Interactive took the criticism to heart, and today announced that a new translation of the game has been created. The publisher states that the game was originally written in French, and that the English version of the game “strayed too far” from what the original story and character motivations were.
To fix it, the release of Mars: War Logs on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 has been delayed until sometime in September. The game was originally scheduled to come out on consoles sometime in May. The English localization of the game has been completely redone, with voice actors called in to re-record dialogue. The new translation can now be patched into the PC version of War Logs and will be included in the console versions at launch.
“Mars contains a vast amount of dialog, even by RPG standards,” said Luc Heninger, director of production at Focus. “The plot has numerous strands and the dialog often has many variants to mirror the hero’s changes in reputation. The tight deadlines between the game release dates meant that the initial English translation lacked depth and contained a number of errors; it was then sent to the recording studio, making the job of the actors extremely difficult. The actual game was thoroughly tested and released with very few bugs on PC, but unfortunately the procedures for the audio and text QA failed and allowed many English localization issues to slip through. We realized the extent of the problem after seeing the first feedback from the press and gamers. The result was so far removed from what we usually produce that we took the decision to halt the submission process for the console version, which was due for release only weeks after the PC title. We have re-written the game text and dialog and, of course, recorded the actors again, replacing the sections that weren’t true to the characters in Mars. All these problems will therefore be fixed in the console version. An update is now available for players with the PC game, and we have also incorporated the new audio in the PC versions on the various download sites.”
In addition to pointing out that War Logs is 33% off today on Steam, Focus has released a new video featuring the re-localized first seven minutes of the game. The voice acting in the game has gotten a noticeable quality boost since it’s release on PC.
Microsoft has announced that the Bing Translator App for Windows is now available.
“Designed specifically for Windows devices, the app places translation technology in your hand by instantly translating content in more than 40 languages,” a spokesperson for Microsoft tells WebProNews. “Whether utilizing your PC’s camera to deliver video mode translation or typing in a quick phrase, the Bing Translator app is a great addition to your Windows devices.”
“In addition to being simple to use, the app was built specifically to take advantage of Windows 8,” he adds. “Use the Share charm to quickly translate highlighted text from other apps or just snap the Bing Translator app to the either side of the screen and translate quickly while doing other things.”
The app also includes offline access in case you know you’re not going to have Wi-Fi or other access. You can download the language pack you need so you can always access translation while offline.
And don’t forget, Microsoft recently added Klingon language to Translator. So there’s that.
You can find the Windows app here.
Google announced that it has added support for five new languages to Google Translate, which brings the total to over 70 languages supported.
The new languages are: Bosnian, Cebuano, Hmong, Javanese and Marathi. All of them except for Bosnian are considered to be in alpha status, so they still have a lot of work to do, but the company says it will continue to test and improve them in time.
“If you took a quick snapshot of content available on the web, you might think that everyone around the world spoke English, Chinese, French or Spanish,” says Google Translate program manager Sveta Kelman. “But in fact, millions of people around the world speak an incredible array of languages that currently have a small presence across the web.”
“Google Translate helps bridge the divide between the content available online and people’s ability to access that information,” says Kelman.
According to Google, the five new languages are spoken by a combined 183 million people.
You can access the new languages at translate.google.com or via the Android or iOS apps.
Google just announced the launch of offline language packages for Google Translate for Android. With the feature, you don’t need an Internet connection to translate your way out of a jam.
If you open the app, and select “offline languages” from the menu, you will be able to choose a package for download. You should probably do this while you do have a connection, so you have it ready.
“To enable offline translation between any two languages, you just need to select them in the offline languages menu,” says associate product manager Minqi Jiang. “Once the packages are downloaded, you’re good to go.”
“While the offline models are less comprehensive than their online equivalents, they are perfect for translating in a pinch when you are traveling abroad with poor reception or without mobile data access,” adds Jiang.
The packages are only available for Android 2.3 and up. 50 languages are supported.