Mountain View, California — Although Google Translate certainly need to polish up to become more perfect in many of its translations, nevertheless, the site offers an incredibly useful tool when trying to interpret a word, phrase or entire site in a foreign language. Internet giant Google on Monday announced that it had added nine new languages to its Translate service, its automatic translation program.
At last, Google unleashed a way for people to transcribe one language into Yiddish.
The Mountain View, California-based company, in a blog post, said Google Translate, which already features dozens of widely used languages including English, French, German, Japanse, Chinese, and Russian as well as some more obscure languages, today, added nine more languages that are Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish. This brings the total number of languages supported by the service to translate to 51.
“The translation quality of these newest languages is still a little rough, but it will improve over time — and we are continuously working to improve quality for all languages supported by Google Translate,” Google said.
Google says that with the latest update, the site now extends supports to all 23 of the official EU languages. And considering the events in Iran during the elections, Google also added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. Google warns users that quality of the translation for the new languages is still basic and may have some glitches.
Similar to other Google Translate updates, these changes in due course will be rolled out to other services as well where the machine translation is used, including Google Friend Connect, Google Talk, Gmail, and most recently Google Docs. However, the new languages have not shown up on any of those services just yet.
Lately, Google has been incorporating Google Translate into many of its other applications, most recently adding support for translation in Google Docs. Google Docs provides word processing, spreadsheet and other programs hosted on the Internet.
The service enables you to automatically translate emails within Gmail, web-pages from one language to another with the help of Google Toolbar, and RSS feeds in Google Reader. In June, Google launched the Google Translator Kit, which is a translation editor that allows translators make human edits within machine translations.
Alternately, machine translation is still better than no translation, and the current update makes it more simpler to read foreign newspapers and communicate with people who speak other languages, even if your grammar is going to be a bit off.