News Google Talk now features real-time translation

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/12/20/google_talk_now_translates/1

Google's IM package now features real-time translation to and from multiple languages. Next step: a small fish you slip into your ear?

 

haha, that's awesome. I swear google's devs just do this stuff for funsies

 

i agree. and the top management saw that this funsies are the stuff that make or break google, so the funsies dev got lotsa budget on their funsies project im sure.

woohoo i used funsies alot. word of the day. thx will

 

Interesting use of the technology they have, but I cant see it being that useful for casual chat, as for the most part, I imagine anybody on your instant messenger contacts list would be speaking your language anyway.

 

how good are the translations??? I'm betting not great

 

The Japanese-English translations are always interesting.

 

What many people who only speak one language don't realize is that languages don't exactly match up like you think they would. quite simply put some words that exist in English to mean one thing will take 2 or 3 words to describe in Russian or Japanese. also some other languages have completely different words that do not exist in English but like the other example have to take several words to describe. many times this description is left up to the interpretation of the translator and oftentimes means something completely different in another part of the same country. Europe is a good example of how the same language can change from city center to township or whatever.

while these translators get us closer and closer the only way that they are going to get perfect is if they hire linguists and have them work hand in hand with the programmers so the software can decipher those small meanings and get them right for each region. then again, that's just what i would do.

the way that these translators work now it looks like someone just referenced a English to Spanish/German/French/Russian/etc dictionary or whatever.

 

translators are buggy as hell in my experience for the reason that MrBurritoMan said.
one day I got bored and decided to put some stuff I had written through a few different languages and some how "we know that what we no longer face" turned to "Soaps derive the fact that what we" when I looped back to english.

 

^lol
Shame all the good feature are in the online Google Talk gadget. Its cool, but I prefer the standalone program

 

Automated translators work respectably well for Latin-derived languages. But languages from the North, Far East, and Middle-East Asia are a definite no-go.