I’ve used Google’s translation tool on several occasions, and it’s been extremely helpful (particularly when I was in Spanish class). Their translator is especially helpful for longer phrases and paragraphs. While it continues to be a service in beta, they have added a new Dictionary tool which works perfectly for one-word queries.
There are 9 different translation options, and they include:
- English-French
- French-English
- English-German
- German-English
- English-Italian
- Italian-English
- English-Spanish
- Spanish-English
I decided to try it out, so I typed the Spanish word “perro” and selected for a translation from Spanish to English. First it displayed what the word meant – dog, and then it gave me a list of related phrases.
Examples of related phrases include:
- Sheep dog
- Take the dog out
- The dog hurt itself
- Stray dog
- Lap dog
- Seeing eye dog
Those were just a handful of the phrases available, but they’re all related and could potentially prove helpful. I found that this dictionary is actually much better for single word queries than several translation services that I tried, and the example phrases that they provide are actually practical and useful.
To try it out, just go to translate.google.com and then click on dictionary at the top of the page.
This is cool, however, it would be even better if there were a link that would be to a .wav file (or such) to hear the word in the language you converted to.
Google is so awesome! Things like this that they add to their services just make common sense, something that alot of companies don’t have. I Agree with “OldManDeath” in that they should have the computer generated word pronounciation or something, it’s something that really hasn’t been offered for free before, and it might skyrocket Google’s service into a dominant dictionary service on the Internet.
Ooooh, that would be nice! Sometimes it’s hard to know how to pronounce a word. Nice idea.
I don’t think that would work. The voice would just sound too robotic. And besides, what if the pronunciation is wrong? These services are not water proof…
Yeah, I think Pieter is right. The computer generated voices are still too robotic and don’t have clear pronunciations all of the time. Although Google does have one of the largest artificial intelligence labs (or so I hear) which means they might be working on a better solution for real translating.
I was not talking about computer generated voices. They have the money to hire linguists to speak the words to be recorded to a .wav or similar file.
It would take a little while, but would be killer for them.
That would still be interesting to put some sort of expression into the voices, because it also depends on the context of words. I think voice recognition and playback is due for a major overhaul, and with the increase in computing power I think more realistic voices can be created.