Translation is tricky enough, but an app that turns your spoken English into Spanish in real-time? It sounds like something out of Star Trek, and that’s exactly what the Jibbigo app for the iPhone claims to do. We tried it out, and we like what we see.
At a glance: Jibbigo would be perfect for any iPhone owner who likes to travel to Spanish-speaking countries. It does well with vital phrases you’d need, such as asking for directions for specific things. It also does it all while offline, so you really only need service for updates. Its price is probably its greatest barrier to entry, and there are a few things it won’t do.
News trickled out this month that Bing Translator had gained Thai support, meaning that users can translate to and from the language in IE8’s Accelerator, with the Microsoft Translator widget, with the Windows Live Messenger bot, with Microsoft Translator for Office, and with the Microsoft Translator API. All in all, it’s good news for anyone who knows the Thai language, though we should note that Google has supported it for some time.
This information prompted us to a do a quick quantitative comparison between the comparable translator services from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Here’s a summary of the three websites:
Google Translate - 51 languages
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish Bing Translator - 20 languages
Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai Yahoo Babel Fish - 13 languages
Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish
Regardless of the fact that Google has more languages, it’s important to remember to also compare quality. Assuming that your languages are supported by more than just one service, we recommend that you compare the two each and decide which one works better for you.
We should also note that while Microsoft and Google both allow any combination of two languages they support, Yahoo only allows translating between certain pairs of languages of the ones that it supports. The fact that Babel Fish is behind Bing Translator is not that surprising, even if Yahoo has a higher market share than Bing. Yahoo is hoping for the Microhoo deal to receive regulatory approval from the US and Europe, which will mean that Bing will be taking the reigns of all search from the two companies regardless. For this reason, Yahoo has likely let Babel Fish remain stagnant.
At least £25 million was spent by forces across England and Wales last year to deal with foreign criminals or help victims and witnesses who cannot speak English.
It is enough to put 500 extra officers on the street for a year.
The figure is a rise of almost three quarters on spending since 2004 and is further evidence of the impact immigration has had on public services.
The increase has also come over the period since the EU expanded in to Eastern Europe which resulting in hundreds of thousands of migrant workers and their families heading to the UK.
Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister who obtained the figures, said: “This reveals one more hidden cost of the failure to control immigration numbers under this Government.
“Many public services have been put under pressure by the scale of immigration, and the police are no exception.
Scottish Parliament chiefs sparked disbelief last night after a firm in India was hired to translate their annual report into GAELIC.
A company based 5,000 miles away in Bangalore landed the Holyrood job when it managed to undercut rivals for the contract by 40 per cent.
But the Asian operation is STILL having to recruit Gaelic speakers back in Scotland to do the work for them.
Last night baffled Highlands MSP Peter Peacock said: “I am flabbergasted that the Scottish Parliament has turned to a company in India to translate the official report into Gaelic.”
Holyrood already employs two Gaelic language staff. But they were deemed “too busy” to deal with translating the 40-page document.
A firm that does language translation for the police and NHS has slashed pay for workers by up to 50%.
Language Line Services provides instant help when, for example, someone calls who doesn’t speak English.
They are put through to a network of freelance inter-preterwho often work from home.
They used to earn up to 35p a minute during the day and 50p at night.
But a memo seen by Your Money reveals the rate has been cut to 24p at all times.
“We appreciate this will not be welcome news,” it reads. One worker fumed: “We have no benefits or security whatsoever and the profit they make from our services is obscene.”
Language Line claimed it affected about 200 workers, and added: “Prices are being driven down by customers and we have had to act.”
Nazis slogans banned in Germany may be legal if they are translated from German into English, one of the country’s highest courts has ruled.
The Federal Court of Justice said it had rescinded a conviction against a man fined 4,200 euros ($5,993) for possessing 100 T-shirts due for sale emblazoned with the words “Blood & Honor” — a translation of the Hitler Youth slogan “Blut und Ehre.”
Countries such as Germany, France and the Netherlands are being targeted by spammers using translation software to send out unsolicited mail in multiple non-English languages.
Released this week, the MessageLabs Intelligence Report, said that some countries are experiencing levels of spam higher than the global average thanks to increasing use of translation software.
“Once again the spammers turn to their online toolbox, the Internet, for their latest tactics. Translation services and templates enable the spammers to push out multiple-language spam attacks and some dubious translations through the use of poor online services highlight the use of these antics,” said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst, Symantec. “Non-English spam now accounts for one in every 20 spam messages, a figure we’ll be closely monitoring to see if spammers continue with their global expansion.”
Pedestrians have been left confused by a road sign telling them to look different ways in different languages.
A temporary road sign in Cardiff city centre urged English speakers to look one way before crossing the road, and Welsh speakers to look the other way.
The sign “pedestrians look left” was translated to say “cerddwyr edrychwch i’r dde” - or “pedestrians look right”.
Cardiff council said the sign was the work of a contractor, and it had been removed after the mistake was noticed.
For those sites that uses Google Friend Connect and its comment widget, Google has just rolled out a novel new feature called: comment translation. With the gadget, users can now unify the language of any comment thread, translating any and all comments easily into their native language.
Once the comment widget plugged into Google Translate, enables readers to translate comments left in foreign languages. This means that if you have one post in Mandarin, another in Spanish, and yet another in Russian, you can click an option to read them all in the same language.
Within the gadget, there is a translate button in the lower left-hand corner. The way it functions is the comment widget has a “Translate” link which then pops up a menu of languages to choose from. Once you have selected your language, all comments that are not in this language will be translated and highlighted in yellow.
However, there is a safe side as well if ever anything goes wrong, you always have the option to revert back to the original text if you wish to do so. Simply select “No Translation” from the same menu.
Many customers wonder what the letters mean in the translated documents we send back to them. Essentially when sending a file back to a client we always add a language code. So if your document was called “Document-to-translate.doc” and we translated it into Greek - we would send it back as “Document-to-translate-EL.doc”.
We use the ISO Language codes. ISO 639 is the set of international standards that lists short codes for language names. It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 and withdrawn in 2002. We use “Alpha-2″ codes (codes composed of 2 letters of the basic Latin alphabet) which are used in ISO 639-1.
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