The internet giant Google has updated its online translation tool to include three new features.

Google Translate now offers free, real-time translation in 51 languages, representing 98 percent of internet users worldwide. Users select languages to translate to and from, and the translation appears virtually without delay as they type.

Another feature will "Romanize" texts with non-Roman characters, such as Chinese and Japanese, transliterating them into their English phonetic equivalents at the click of a button. The process works in reverse for Persian, Arabic and Hindi, so that users can type words as they sound, and have them automatically transliterated into native script.

Finally, a text-to-speech audio feature will translate foreign languages into spoken English.

Translators have speculated whether Google is a threat to freelance translation. Earlier this year, the American Translators Association denied that technology could ever eliminate the need for human translators.

Some interpreters think Google Translate will change the industry, however. The service now invites users to submit suggestions for better translations as they go along, so the accuracy and quality of translations is constantly improving.

California-based Mandarin interpreter Samuel Chong told reporter Sunny Wang last week that "people will no longer need freelance translation services for small translations. They will go to Google Translate directly, and Google Translate will do a good job for them."

He said the change was "inevitable, really inevitable," but predicted that translation services would survive by moving into other areas, such as oral translation.

21 November 2009

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