At last, Google has released something that will benefit Google Talk users too! Just yesterday they announced that new translation bots have been added to Google Talk. That means that you can essentially “chat” with the bot, and whatever you say to them, they’ll translate it back. It works by adding a bot as one of your friends. So for example, I added the Chinese speaking bot to my friend list (en2zh@bot.talk.google.com), and then when I said “Hello,” it responded with “Hello” in Chinese. When I said “How are you?” it responded with the same, just translated in Chinese, nifty, huh?
There are a handful of different languages that have translation bots already created for them like English to French or English to Italian. All you’d have to do is find the corresponding name (English to French is en2fr) and plug it in to the following address: botnamehere@bot.talk.google.com. So English to French would be en2fr@bot.talk.google.com. Other languages available include:
ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en, zh2en
Given that I don’t speak Chinese, I had no clue how well it translated what was said. Over at Google Blogoscoped, one of the people who commented pointed out how the quality of the translation “is still laughably (or painfully) bad.” So that answered my question. Just with any other translation service, expect that things won’t always translate perfectly. Regardless, it’s still a nice and convenient translation service.
Source: Google Talk Blog
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Tags: Google, Google Talk
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I tried the en2nl bot. Although it’s cool to have a quick translator at your fingertips, it’s not accurate.
Allow me to demonstrate.
Me: “I can speak Dutch.”
Bot: “Ik kan spreken Nederlands.”
What the bot said actually means something like “I can speaking Dutch”, so I wouldn’t trust the chat bot if I were you. But then again, it’s just as accurate as any online robot translator out there.
The translations will get better over time.
It would be great if you could set Google Talk to automatically translate text from a given contact. Then you could communicate with people that speak a different language without having to go through a separate translation service.
I agree with CoryC. The translator will become better over time. Using Google Talk is a good way for the translator software to ‘learn’. Practice makes perfect they say.
Does anyone (including Ryan and Ashley) know of translation bots for MSN/Live Messenger?
I’ve added bot@techie.com but that one seems to be offline and MTBot-en_us@hotmail.com but it’s a prototype.
It would be cool if Google made it easy for people to suggest better translations for phrases when chatting.
That would be really awesome! I’m sure they’ll have something like that in store, but the translations probably have to get better before they’ll allow that.
No, unfortunately I don’t know of any other translation bots for the other networks.
The translation seem to be a bit off when you type something more complex. The way the translator translated ‘great’ is wrong actually. It is technically correct but the ‘great’ in that case is translated wrongly. I hope things will be better as we move along.