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December 20, 2007

Now you're talking

trans_bot.png
Google Talk's new translation feature.
Picture: Google
Google announced earlier this week that it has released a new real-time translation feature for its popular Google Talk chat client. A '20 per cent project' (so called because such projects are personal ones Google's engineers are encouraged to pursue during 20 per cent of their working hours) the translation feature is one of the first to be incorporated into a chat client.

It works like this: you invite a bot to join your chat, and everything that you then type is translated into one of 24 target languages. The bots use names which identify their function, taking the form "[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com" So, if you want to translate a conversation in Japanese and English, you would invite your Japanese-speaking friend together with the bots to translate (here, ja2en@bot.talk.google.com and en2ja@bot.talk.google.com)

As with all other machine translation systems, accuracy varies. Such software (like AltaVista's Babel Fish) just doesn't do context and can't recognize different words with identical spellings. Writing to my friend Zac in Japanese, Google's bot insisted that his name be translated as 'a little money'! Despite such limitations, however, the new translation feature is a welcome addition to the IM world.

Now if they would only get this running on my phone...

Posted by Marcus at December 20, 2007 11:05 AM     

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