5 New Languages in Google Translate

Google Translate added 5 new languages: Armenian (6.7 million speakers), Azerbaijani (20-30 million speakers), Basque (about 660,000 speakers), Georgian (4 million speakers) and Urdu (70 million speakers), but don't expect to read high-quality translations because the language models are still in alpha. "Translation to and from ALPHA languages may not work as well as other languages, as these systems are still in early stages of development," explains Google Translate's FAQ.

In a recent article from Spiegel, Google's Franz Och said that "the databases for 296 other languages are in development". Right now, Google Translate supports 57 languages, while Microsoft's Bing Translator has support for 30 languages.

Google Translate Annoyance

One of the most annoying issues with Google Translate is that it's very difficult to copy the translated version of a web page. Translate a web page, copy some text, paste it in a text editor and you'll notice that, before each translated phrase, there's the original version of the phrase.


Fortunately, you can properly copy some text from a translated page if you use the translation feature from Google Toolbar or from Google Chrome. Microsoft's translation service has a more flexible interface and it doesn't mix the translated text with the original text.

Unlisted YouTube Videos

YouTube added a very useful feature for those who want to upload videos, but only share them with a limited number of people. Until now, you could make a video private and share it with up to 25 YouTube users.

The new access level is called "unlisted", which means that only people who know the address of the video can view it. "The video will not appear in any of YouTube's public spaces, such as search results, your channel, or the Browse page, but the link can be shared with anyone."

To watch an unlisted video, you don't need a YouTube account and there's no limit for the number of people that can watch your videos. Anyone can link to the video, but it won't be indexed by search engines.

"Even though your video will not appear in any of YouTube's public spaces, links to the video could still appear elsewhere on the web if anyone who knows the video's URL shares it. It is therefore up to you to maintain the privacy of your video and the unlisted URL. You can further restrict the video at any time by returning to your account and marking the video as Private," explains YouTube's help center.


{ via YouTube Blog }

Insert Images into a Gmail Messages Using Drag and Drop

Gmail extended the feature that lets you add attachments using drag and drop, so you can also insert images into a message. The new functionality only works in Google Chrome, but it will probably be added to Firefox, as well. (Is this the first Gmail feature that only works in Google's browser?)

To try it, make sure you use Google Chrome and Gmail's rich text mode. Compose a new message, open your favorite file manager, find a photo and drag it to the Gmail message. For some reason, I was only able to drag one photo at a time. After inserting the image, you can resize it and adjust its position.

Gmail has a Labs feature for inserting images, which works in all browsers, but it's less convenient.


{ via Gmail Blog }

Google's Sidebar for Internet Explorer

Many years ago, when browsers didn't have search boxes, Google launched a sidebar for Internet Explorer 4 and 5. The sidebar was available at google.com/ie and it was later used for all kinds of purposes: sidebar for Opera or Firefox, iGoogle gadget, mobile interface or as a simple interface for scraping Google results.


Scroogle, a proxy for Google search that doesn't use cookies and doesn't store search records, used this interface until yesterday, when Google decided to redirect it to a page that promoted a Google-optimized version of Internet Explorer 8.


"We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. That interface was at www.google.com/ie but on May 10, 2010 they took it down and inserted a redirect to /toolbar/ie8/sidebar.html. It used to have a search box, and the results it showed were generic during that entire time. Now that interface is gone. It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google's main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible."

When you create a service that scrapes web pages, you should know that a minor change to a page can break your service. Asking Google to keep an old interface, while breaking Google's terms of service that prevent you from accessing services "through any automated means", is ironic.

Fortunately for Scroogle and for all the users of google.com/ie, the simple interface is still available at http://www.google.com/search?output=ie, but it's not clear for how long.

It's interesting to know that "ie" is not the only value allowed for the "output" parameter. You can also use: "linux", "bsd", "microsoft", "mac", "unclesam" to see other old templates for Google search.

{ Thanks, George R. }

Google Translate Adds Text-to-Speech for More Languages

Google Translate has made the text-to-speech feature more useful by adding 27 new languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.

Google used the open-source speech synthesizer eSpeak, but I'm sure that this is just a placeholder until Google manages to obtain better results. "You may notice that the audio quality of these languages isn’t at the same level as the previously released languages. Clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect, but we will continue to improve the performance and number of languages that are supported," says Google's Fergus Henderson.

Initially, the feature was only available for English, but 4 other languages have been added in the past two months: Haitian Creole, French, Italian and German.

To try Google's TTS service, go to Google Translate, type some text, translate it and click on the audio icon to listen to the translation.

Translate Microsoft Office Documents Using Google Translate

Google offers three services for translating Microsoft Office documents, but none of them works well. You can upload documents to Google Translate, but the output is an HTML file that can't be properly saved and that doesn't include images. There's also Google Translator Toolkit, which has a buggy document converter. Google Docs has a translation feature, but the document is first converted to HTML and the original formatting isn't always preserved.

DocTranslator is a service that translates Microsoft Office documents using Google Translate, but it manages to preserve the layout of the original file. Unlike Google Docs, DocTranslator is not limited to Microsoft Word documents that have less than 500 KB and it works for Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, as well. DocTranslator uses a Java applet to upload the files and it translates them using Google Translate's API.

"Its benefits are that you can save the documents in their original file format and also maintain the original layout (fonts, tables, columns, spacing, etc.). It basically replaces the text of the file while keeping everything else," explained a user of the service.

The following screenshots show a document translated in Google Docs and the same document translated using DocTranslator and opened in Microsoft Word.



{ Thanks, Anonymous. }