Google betas cross-language search

Stephen Withers
Friday, 25 May 2007 03:57

Your IT - Home IT

A new feature of Google Translate allows users to enter search terms in their own language, search pages written in a different language, and then have the results translated into their own tongue.

The idea is to make the information contained in Web pages more accessible to speakers of other languages.

"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," wrote Google research scientist Franz Och, software engineer Maureen Heymans and international product manager Jeff Chin. "We think this feature will be particularly useful for our international users since although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the internet is still in English."

There's more than one service that will translate the contents of web pages, but the significance of Google's new feature is that it allows searching in a language different to that of the pages being searched.

Examples given by Google is that an Arabic speaker could look for restaurants in New York, by searching for "مطعم نيويورك" or a Chinese speaker could look for documents on machine learning on the English web by looking for "机å¨å­¦ä¹ ".

An English language example is "wine tasting events in Bordeaux".

The supported languages are English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Traditional), and Chinese (Simplified).