25 Haziran 2012 Pazartesi

Translate more Indic languages with the updated Google Translate for iPhone app

To contact us Click HERE
Back in June, we launched five new experimental Indic languages for Google Translate on the desktop and mobile web app. Today, we’ve updated the Google Translate for iPhone app to add these new alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. This brings the total number of languages supported by the app to 63 languages.



The updated app supports the ability to view dictionary results for single words and to display romanizations for these new Indic languages. So even if you can't read the script the words are written in, you can still take a shot at reading the translation.

Since these are still experimental alpha languages, you can expect translations be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese—which have much more parallel data to power our statistical machine translation approach. Despite these challenges, we believe users will find these new languages helpful and we're excited to be making them available through the Translate app.

Google Translate for iPhone now supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them. Get the latest version of the Google Translate for iPhone app from the App Store now and start breaking down language barriers wherever you are!

Sometimes it’s easier just to write it

To contact us Click HERE
With our most recent update to Google Translate for Android, we’ve added an experimental new input feature: handwriting on your touchscreen.
Maybe you’d like to see if three 木 make a 森, but you don’t have a Japanese keyboard installed? Just use the handwriting icon

Our goal is to break down the language barrier, all the time, everywhere. By adding handwriting input directly into our Android app we hope to help you get translation done even more quickly and easily. Sometimes you don’t know how to say what you want translated, sometimes you can’t type it, and sometimes it’s easier just to write it. We think of handwriting on the touchscreen as another natural input that you may want to use to complement the keyboard, microphone, or camera.



This is still an experimental feature. It’s available in Chinese and Japanese, and you can enable it for English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish if you like. (We currently only support single-character input for Chinese and Japanese.) Just as with speech recognition and our translations themselves, our handwriting recognition happens in the cloud, allowing us to continually improve accuracy without requiring you to download new versions of the app.

Download Google Translate in Android Market — it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 1.5 and up. Then, you can easily find out whether 自 really means ‘server rack with a Wi-Fi antenna’.

Posted by Daniel Keysers, Software Engineer

Tutmonda helplingvo por ĉiuj homoj

To contact us Click HERE
Today, we are adding Esperanto to Google Translate, making it our 64th supported language.

Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof started his quest for an easy-to-learn language shared by all people in the 1870s and first published the ideas in 1887 with his book
Unua Libro. The concept of a common language spread quickly, and initial reactions to Esperanto have ranged from suppression to enthusiastic embrace. Now, 125 years later, Esperanto has hundreds of thousands of active speakers, millions of people with some knowledge of the language, and even a few hundred people who learned it from birth, taught by their parents.

Esperanto and Google Translate share the goal of helping people understand each other, this connection has been made even in this blog post. Therefore, we are very excited that we can now offer translation for this language as well.

The Google Translate team was actually surprised about the high quality of machine translation for Esperanto. As we know from many experiments, more training data (which in our case means more existing translations) tends to yield better translations. For Esperanto, the number of existing translations is comparatively small. German or Spanish, for example, have more than 100 times the data; other languages on which we focus our research efforts have similar amounts of data as Esperanto but don’t achieve comparable quality yet. Esperanto was constructed such that it is easy to learn for humans, and this seems to help automatic translation as well.

Although the system is still far from perfect, we hope that our latest addition helps you to learn more about Esperanto’s history and culture. Translation to and from Esperanto will soon be available on translate.google.com, in our mobile web app, and in the Google Translate app for Android and iOS.

An easier way to type in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Hebrew

To contact us Click HERE
Knowing what you want to translate is sometimes only half the battle. You may have a letter from your secret admirer sitting in front of you, but if you can’t type the words into Google Translate the meaning can remain elusive.

Typing in languages which use different character sets can be a frustrating problem in computer labs, internet cafés, and sometimes even on home computers if standard Latin alphabet keyboards are the only option available.

To make typing in these languages easier we began including virtual keyboards and transliteration input methods in Google Translate last year, and we’ve been working to expand that support over time. Today we’re happy to announce three major additions to our input methods: Japanese, Vietnamese, and Hebrew language support.

To use transliteration input methods, just select the ‘Allow phonetic typing’ option when typing in Google Translate.
Since releasing transliteration support for these languages a few days ago, we’ve noticed significant improvements in the the speed of input (for instance, Vietnamese text input has become 20% faster with the new input method) which we hope to see translate into a better experience for everyone.

Keep an eye out over the next few months as we add support for more languages.

Would you like to use Google’s transliteration input methods or virtual keyboards across the whole web? Try out our Chrome extension, which includes transliteration for over 20 languages and virtual keyboards for 70 more.

Posted by C. Andrew Warren, Associate Product Manager, Internationalization Team

Now you can polish up Google’s translation of your website

To contact us Click HERE
Since we first launched the Website Translator plugin back in September 2009, more than a million websites have added the plugin. While we’ve kept improving our machine translation system since then, we may not reach perfection until someone invents full-blown Artificial Intelligence. In other words, you’ll still sometimes run into translations we didn’t get quite right.

So today, we’re launching a new experimental feature (in beta) that lets you customize and improve the way the Website Translator translates your site. Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar. They’ll also now be able to 'suggest a better translation' when they notice a translation that’s not quite right, and later you can accept and use that suggestion on your site.

To get started:

  1. Add the Website Translator plugin and customization meta tag to your website
  2. Then translate a page into one of 60+ languages using the Website Translator
To tweak a translation:

  1. Hover over a translated sentence to display the original text
  2. Click on 'Contribute a better translation'
  3. And finally, click on a phrase to choose an automatic alternative translation -- or just double-click to edit the translation directly.
For example, if you’re translating your site into Spanish, and you want to translate Cat not to gato but to Cat, you can tweak it as follows:

If you’re signed in, the corrections made on your site will go live right away -- the next time a visitor translates a page on your website, they’ll see your correction. If one of your visitors contributes a better translation, the suggestion will wait until you approve it. You can also invite other editors to make corrections and add translation glossary entries. You can learn more about these new features in the Help Center.

This new experimental feature is currently free of charge. We hope this feature, along with Translator Toolkit and the Translate API, can provide a low cost way to expand your reach globally and help to break down language barriers.

24 Haziran 2012 Pazar

Rendering custom data in the Custom Search element

To contact us Click HERE
Last year we introduced Rich Snippets in Custom Search, allowing you to define your own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your custom search results. A few months later we showed you how to render some of these rich snippets in your Custom Search element. Sure, this was a powerful way to let your visitors see thumbnails or interact with the results via actions. But we felt it was still too constrained. It is with great pleasure that today we're announcing that you now have full rendering control of all your metadata in the Custom Search element.

What do I mean? If a picture is worth a thousand words, an example is worth a thousand pictures. Here's a fully customized element, showcasing results and metadata from Scribd.com:
By  -  pages -  views  - last modified 


The results really jump out at you, huh? The thumbnails really help users see what they're looking at, but we've shown you those before. Same with the Download action links by each result. But never before could you include arbitrary, per-result metadata with your Google Custom Search results so easily. Notice the author, length, views and date information in each result. There's even an icon representing each result's document type.

So how can you add this to your page? Let's take a look.

First, you need to include custom attributes within your webpages, either via microformats, RDFa, or a special markup called PageMaps. A PageMap identifies specific attributes that Google recognizes and indexes, and then returns along with search results. Our prior blog post on Structured Custom Search tells you how to add PageMaps to your site. Please keep in mind that your site needs to be re-indexed, which can take some time. Therefore, your PageMaps might not show up immediately.

Once your custom attributes have been indexed, you're ready to tell the element how to render them. If you don't already have the element on your page, you can add it with a few lines:
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// Load the Search API
google.load('search', '1');

// Set a callback to load the Custom Search Control when you page loads
google.setOnLoadCallback(
function(){
new google.search.CustomSearchControl('INSERT-YOUR-ID').draw('cse');
},
true);
</script>
<div id="cse"></div>
Here's the Scribd.com sample, with only the default rich snippet inclusion:

It looks okay, but let's make it better.

We have to override the default rendering, by adding this line to the onLoadCallback:
google.search.Csedr.addOverride("mysite_");
Now, create a div to hold all of the rendering information - put it right above the div that the element uses:
<div style="display:none">
</div>
Okay, now that everything's set up, it's time for the good part. First off, let's try shrinking the thumbnails a bit. Inside the div that was just added above, and tell the element to render the images at 48x48 pixels:
<div id="mysite_thumbnail">
<div data-if="Vars.thumbnail" class="gs-image-box gs-web-image-box">
<a class="gs-image" data-attr="{href:url, target:target}">
<img class="gs-image" data-attr="{src:thumbnail.src, width:48, height: 48}"/>
</a>
</div>
</div>
This replaces the default thumbnail rendering code with a similar version that sets the image dimensions directly.

Here's the same sample with the above code added:
Now it's time to add the new content and tweak the rendering of the basic content, too:
<div id="mysite_webResult">
<div class="gs-webResult gs-result"
data-vars="{longUrl:function() {
var i = unescapedUrl.indexOf(visibleUrl);
return i < 1 ? visibleUrl : unescapedUrl.substring(i);}}">

<table>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div data-if="Vars.richSnippet" data-attr="0"
data-body="render('thumbnail',richSnippet,{url:unescapedUrl,target:target})"></div>
</td>

<td valign="top">
<div class="gs-title">
<a class="gs-title" data-attr="{href:unescapedUrl,target:target}"
data-body="html(title)"></a>
</div>
<div class="gs-snippet" data-body="html(content)"></div>
<div class="gs-visibleUrl gs-visibleUrl-short" data-body="longUrl()"></div>
<div style="& Vars.richSnippet.document">
<img data-attr="{src:Vars.richSnippet.document.filetypeImage}">
By <span data-body="Vars.richSnippet.document.author"></span> -
<span data-body="Vars.richSnippet.document.pageCount"></span> pages -
<span data-body="Vars.richSnippet.document.viewCount"></span> views
- last modified <span data-body="Vars.richSnippet.document.timeAgo"></span>
</div>

<div data-if="Vars.richSnippet && Vars.richSnippet.action" class="gs-actions"
data-body="render('action',richSnippet,{url:unescapedUrl,target:target})"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
</div>
Voila! The sample is now complete, and here's how it looks:

This example is a bit more complex. It shows how to use the render() function to call other code, and also how you can include any JavaScript logic. You can even define internal functions, such as longUrl().

Didn't quite catch all of that or want to do even more? Check out the documentation.

The best part of announcing new features like this is seeing what innovative implementations people come up with. Don't keep us waiting - come show off your handiwork in our support forum or IRC channel!Posted by: David Gibson, Software Engineer and Adam Feldman, Product Manager

Google App Engine Research Awards for scientific discovery

To contact us Click HERE


Since its launch four years ago, Google App Engine has been the platform for innovative and diverse applications. Today, Google’s University Relations team is inviting academic researchers to explore App Engine as a platform for their research activities through a new program: the Google App Engine Research Awards.

These research awards provide an opportunity for university faculty to experiment with App Engine, which provides services for building and hosting web applications on the same systems that power Google’s products and services. App Engine offers fast development and deployment, simple administration and built-in scalability -- it’s designed to adapt to large-scale data storage needs and sudden traffic spikes.

As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to support cutting-edge scientific research across the board, this call for applications welcomes university faculty’s proposals in all fields. Projects may focus on activities such as social or economic experiments, development of academic aids, analysis of gene sequence data, or using App Engine MapReduce to crunch large datasets, just to name a few.

This new award program will support up to 15 projects by providing App Engine credits in the amount of $60,000 to each project for one year. In its first year, the program is launched in a limited number of countries. Please see the RFP for details.

If your research has the potential to advance scientific discovery, generates heavy data loads, or needs a reliable platform for running large-scale apps, we encourage you to submit your proposal. Information on how to apply is available on the Google Research website. Applications will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. PST, May 11, 2012.