Google suddenly gains Swedish translation
Friday, 9. May 2008, 08:48:54
All of a sudden today all the English search results on Swedish Google have gained a “Translate this page” link. Apparently, this is something that English Google has had for quite some time, but since I always get a localised version due to my browser’s language settings, I have not seen them before. Until today, when the Swedish translation popped up.
I was expecting to see something like the bad TranExp word-for-word computer translations that some sites keep posting as “Swedish” versions of their home pages, hoping to attract visitors, but that rather scare them away, or something more Babelfish-like that can be understood. So I tried it with a page that I do translate myself, namely the Debian home page.
The Debian home page has an official Swedish translation, done by myself, so I compared it with Google’s translation and found that they must pick up, somehow, that the official translation corresponds to the original, because it has picked up most of my manual translation. There are some mismatched, for instance “Site map” has turned into “Sajtkarta” instead of “Sidöversikt” as I have translated it, and the security advisories look weird, but overall it looks quite good.
Trying the translation of a page that does not have an exact official translation, like Opera Software’s home page does give a slightly worse result, but still quite comprehensible. And its translation of the “fast facts” page is lightyears ahead of what TranExp produced.
It seems they also have support for translating from Swedish, which means that you can now “enjoy” Swedish tabloids, if you would want to…
I was expecting to see something like the bad TranExp word-for-word computer translations that some sites keep posting as “Swedish” versions of their home pages, hoping to attract visitors, but that rather scare them away, or something more Babelfish-like that can be understood. So I tried it with a page that I do translate myself, namely the Debian home page.
The Debian home page has an official Swedish translation, done by myself, so I compared it with Google’s translation and found that they must pick up, somehow, that the official translation corresponds to the original, because it has picked up most of my manual translation. There are some mismatched, for instance “Site map” has turned into “Sajtkarta” instead of “Sidöversikt” as I have translated it, and the security advisories look weird, but overall it looks quite good.
Trying the translation of a page that does not have an exact official translation, like Opera Software’s home page does give a slightly worse result, but still quite comprehensible. And its translation of the “fast facts” page is lightyears ahead of what TranExp produced.
It seems they also have support for translating from Swedish, which means that you can now “enjoy” Swedish tabloids, if you would want to…
