No More separate Google Dictionary

Google Dictionary is no longer obtainable as a standalone service at google.com/dictionary. You can still find it in Google Web Search and Google Translate. For example, you can look for [define keyword] and click "more" or search for [keyword] and click "Dictionary" in the look for options sidebar.

A New Look for Google Translate

Google Translate is the newest Google service with a new plan based on Google+. Since Google Translate's interface is simple, there aren't many changes: a new grey header, updated buttons and drop-downs.

"We're working on a project to bring you a new and enhanced Google experience, and over the next few months, you'll carry on to see more updates to our look and feel. The way people use and experience the web is developing, and our goal is to give you a more seamless and reliable online experience—one that works no matter which Google product you're using or what device you're using it on," explained Google last month.

After launching a new border for Google Search, Google created two themes that preview Gmail's new design and ongoing to test Google Calendar's new UI and Blogger's new UI. Up next: Google Docs, Google Sites, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader and almost certainly other services.

Google Translate, Now With Voice Input

Google Chrome 11 additional support for HTML speech input API. "With this API, developers can give web apps the aptitude to transcribe your voice to text. When a web page uses this feature, you simply click on an icon and then speak into your computer's microphone. The recorded audio is sent to language servers for record, after which the text is typed out for you."

Google Translate is the first Google repair that uses this feature. If you use Google Chrome 11 Beta, Google Chrome 12 Dev/Canary or a recent Chromium build and visit Google Translate, you can click the voice contribution icon. Right now, this characteristic only works for English, so you need to select "English" from the list of input languages.

Unfortunately, the results aren't great. I tried to interpret "beautiful sunshine" into French, but the speech-to-text engine didn't work correctly and Google had to translate "wake up beautiful sunshine girl".

Introducing the Google Translate app for iPhone

Back in August 2008, we launched a Google interpret HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today, the official Google Translate for iPhone app is obtainable for download from the App Store. The new app has all of the features of the web app, plus some significant new trappings designed to improve your overall translation experience.

Speak to translate

The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and—just like the web app—you can convert a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to transform.

Listen to your translations

You can also listen to your translations vocal out loud in one of 23 different languages. This feature uses the same new speech synthesizer voices as the desktop account of Google Translate we introduced last month.

Full-screen mode

Another feature that strength come in handy is the ability to easily increase the translated text to full-screen size. This way, it’s much easier to read the text on the screen, or show the translation to the person you are communicating with. Just tap on the zoom icon to rapidly zoom in.

And the app also includes all of the major features of the web app, counting the ability to view dictionary results for single words, access your starred translations and translation history even when offline, and support romanized wording like Pinyin and Romaji.

You can download Google Translate now as of the App Store globally. The app is obtainable in all iOS supported languages, but you’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch iOS version 3 or later.

Google Translate's Conversation Mode

Google has recently demoed a new feature that will make Google Translate a lot more useful: conversation mode. Instead of typing the text you want to translate, you can just speak it and Google will convert speech into text, translate the text and use text-to-speech to output the result. You can already do that if you install the Google Translate app from the Android Market. Conversation mode lets you quickly switch between two languages, so that two people can have a conversation even if they speak different languages.

"Google showed off a new application that translates conversations on Android mobiles at a recent conference in Germany. Google employees held a conversation over two Android mobiles with one person speaking German and the other English. The application worked its magic after each persons statement and then referred the translated message back to the other person," reported Simon Thomas.

Unfortunately, the results aren't always great. Google Translate's conversation mode will be released in a few months.

Share your story with the new Google Translate

Today, you may have noticed a brighter looking Google Translate We’re currently rolling out with several changes globally to our look and feel that should make translating text, webpages and documents on the Google Translate even easier. These changes will be available globally within a couple of days.

With today’s functional and visual changes we wanted to make it simpler for you to discover and make the most of the Google Translate’s many features and integrations. For example, did you know that you can search across languages on Google using Google Translate? Or that you can translate the incoming email in Gmail or take Google Translate with you on your phone? We’ve added all these tips on the new Do more with Google Translate page. You can also see some of these tips rotating on the new homepage.

We’ve also created an Inside Google Translate? Or that you can translate incoming email in Gmail or take the Google Translate with you on your phone? We’ve added all these tips on the new Do more with Google Translate page. You can also see some of these tips rotating on the new homepage.

We’ve also created an Inside Google Translate page, where you can learn how we create our translations. Is it the work of magic elves or learned linguists? Here Anton Andryeyev, an engineer on our team, gives you the inside scoop:

It’s always inspiring for us to learn how Google Translate enables people to break down communication barriers around the world. Lisa J. recently shared with us how she uses the Google Translate to stay in touch with her grandparents. “I moved to the U.S. from China when I was six,” Lisa told us, “so I speak both English and Chinese fluently but I’m not very good at reading the complex Chinese alphabet.” When she gets an email from her grandparents in China, Google Translate helps her understand the sentences she can’t quite read. She also uses the Google Translate when she’s writing her response. “I use Google Translate to make sure I’m using the right character in the right place,” she explained.

Do you use Google Translate to stay in touch with distant relatives? Read foreign news? Or make the most of your vacation? We’d love to hear from you, and invite you to share your story Google Translate blog. with us. Who knows, we might feature your story on the 

How Google Translate Works

Google uploaded a video that explains how the Google's machine translation service works. It's fascinating to see how much the Google Translate has improved in the past 4 years and how many Google services are used in it.

Here's the full text of the video:

"Google Translate is a free tool that enables you to translate the sentences, documents and even whole websites instantly. But how exactly does it work? While it may seem like we have a room full of bilingual elves working for us, in fact all of our translations come from computers. These computers use a process called 'statistical machine translation' -- which is just a fancy way to say that our computers generate translations based on the patterns found in the large amounts of text.

But let's take a step back. If you want to teach someone a new language you might start by teaching them vocabulary words and the grammatical rules that explain how to construct sentences. A computer can learn foreign language the same way - by referring to vocabulary and a set of the rules. But languages are complicated and, as any language learner can tell you, there are exceptions to almost any rule. When you try to capture all of these exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions, in a computer program, the translation quality begins to break down. Google Translate takes a different approach.

Instead of trying to teach our computers all the rules of a language, we let our computers discover the rules for themselves. They do this by analyzing millions and millions of the documents that have already been translated by the human translators. These translated texts come from books, organizations like the UN and websites from all around the world. Our computers scan these texts looking for statistically significant patterns -- that is to say, patterns between the translation and the original text that are unlikely to occur by the chance. Once the computer finds a pattern, it can use this pattern to translate the similar texts in the future. When you repeat this process billions of times you end up with billions of patterns and one very smart computer program. For some languages however we have fewer translated documents available and therefore fewer patterns that our software has detected. This is why our translation quality will vary by language and language pair. We know our translations aren't always perfect but by constantly providing new translated texts we can make our computers smarter and our translations better. So next time you translate a sentence or webpage with Google Translate, think about those millions of documents and billions of patterns that are ultimately led to your translation - and all of it happening in the blink of an eye."