Googlified

The Google Code team released add two new APIs to the AJAX API family this week, the Visualization API and Language API. The Google Visualization API enables users to use the API to create visualizations from raw data using SQL-like queries with the API and it is integrated into Google Spreadsheet so that you can include the visualizations in the Spreadsheet.

The other one, Google Language API, offers language translation and detection for all the languages that Google Translate supports - currently at 13 language and 29 language pairs. Basically, they stole the idea that I stole from them. :) Of course, they got everything covered.

Google Talk launched two dozen of translation bots yesterday that you add to your Google Talk contact list and use them to translate between languages on the fly. For example, the translation bot de2en@bot.talk.google.com is German to English, and en2fr@bot.talk.google.com will translate English inputs into French. You can find a list of 24 language pairs that the bots support on Google Operating System.

Comparing to Google Translate, this feature is really wonderful when you need to translate a lot of vocabularies. The downside is that you will need to add a lot of these bots to your contact list if you need to translate between several languages. A better approach, in my opinion, is that they should identify the input languages, like this Language Identifier on Xerox’s website. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great, but there are always room for improvement.

Google Operating System reports that Google Translate has dropped Systran and switched to use their own translation system.

[The new version] use an approach called statistical machine translation. […] It uses existing source and target language translations (done by human translators at the U.N.) to find patterns it then uses to build rules for translating between those languages. [Wikipedia]

Google Translate now also supports translations between German to French. Philipp Lenssen commented that the new system is “slightly superior” than the previous one, though “couldn’t see a clear winner yet”.

I second that.

Google Translate today introduced a new feature - Google Dictionary, where you can get a word’s translations, definition and sometimes related phrases. Right now, dictionary translation is only available between English and French, Italian, Spanish and German in beta.

Using Google Dictionary is pretty straight forward, Google explains:

1. Type a word or short phrase into the search box.
2. Select the language of the dictionary in the “Dictionary” drop down menu.
3. Hit the Enter key or click on the “Find” button.

I would probably stick with Answers.com for now, translate.google.com isn’t short.

UPDATE: Now on the Official Google Blog.

[via Googling Google]

Don’t speak Spanish but looking for search results in Spanish? No problem, go to Google Translate, translate the query, and go back to Google and do the search. Hmm, do you notice that there are a lot of back and forth going on? Now, with the new feature on Google Translate, you can do it in less steps.

Go to Google Translate, click on the Search Results tab, type in your query and choose your language and the language you want the results to be in… Err, it’s probably just as much as complicated with the long URL it has. Anyways, with this new feature, you can see the results of the original language and the translated version juxtaposed against each other on the same page for comparing. It’s not a bad way to learn a new language*. :)

*quotes Google: While machine translation is not perfect, it’s usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access.

The other day Philipp Lenssen predicted that Google will have an API for Google Translate by 2009. “[Spanish of this blog was] automatically translated with the terrific Google Translation API. Several native speakers/ readers have told me the translations are absolutely fluent, except for the occasional weirdness due to cultural differences, or some very rare grammar hiccups.” he said.

I think that creating a Google Translate API would not just be cool, but extremely useful. Two days later, I start coding, clackety-clack, clackety-clack… Here I present you the beta version of the uOGT API, short for unOfficial Google Translate API.

Unlike others, uOGT allows users to translate selections of text by including them in a SPAN tag and with class “t”. For example,<span class="t">something to translate</span>. Of course, like most of Google’s web APIs(though this is unofficial), this one requires you to include a JavaScript file to the pages that you want to translate as well(you will also need to upload a server-side file). So is it going to take longer to download the pages that included with the JS file? No, it won’t, because the file is so small - less than 800 bytes, in my example’s setting… (Google’s homepage is 10,000 bytes as today, including images)

To run uOGT, your server needs to have PHP version >=4.3 or 5 installed. The client-side script will work on most of the modern browsers(Firefox, Opera, etc…), except Internet Explorer(I am NOT anti-IE, I don’t know why it doesn’t work… I am working to resolve this issue).

You can download the file here[zip]. After extracting the files on the computer, you can edit the value of LP and URL in file “api.js”: LP is the language pairs to be translate, and the URL property should be the relative URL(which works better) for the server-side file, “translation.php”. Upload all the files, and run “example.html” in a browser, such as Firefox.

You can find a demonstration on the project page, as well as a simple example. This is pretty much it… Tell me what you think. :D

[inspiration and the image from Google Blogoscoped, Google logo is a trademark of Google, Inc]

UPDATE: The development of this project is no longer active, if anyone wants to continue the development, let me know.

UPDATE 2: There’s an official Translate API, but with a lot of restrictions. Also, Amos Vryhof is now responsible for the development of this unofficial API. You can find the latest fix on Google Code. Thanks Amos. :)