Google launches free Turkish translation service

by Lou Ann Matossian

Published: Thursday February 05, 2009

Google Translate now offers translations to and from Turkish. Minneapolis - Merhaba. So you've found a Web page in Turkish and want to know what it says. Maybe you've come across an archival document, a family letter, the back of an old photo, or today's newspaper. Years ago, the elder generation might have been able to read it. Now you don't know who can help, and your Turkish-English dictionary offers only bits and pieces of a scrambled mosaic.

To sort out the word order, the inflections, the idioms of Turkish, you need a translator. Unfortunately, the free translation software online is almost worse than your dictionary. Instead of clarifying the picture, it serves you word salad.

Thanks to Google, help is on the way. On February 1, the popular Internet search engine added Turkish and six additional languages to its online service, Google Translate. While not comparable in quality to a human translation, Google's machine translation can provide a rough idea of a Turkish text in a fraction of the time you would take to look up every other word in the dictionary. And it's free.

In addition to deciphering Turkish texts or entire Web pages, English-speakers can now surf the Turkish-language Internet. Google translates English search terms into Turkish, finds the most relevant Web pages, and displays them in both languages.

The process also works in reverse. Anything written in Google Translate's 40 other languages can now be translated almost instantly into Turkish.

Popular demand may have helped to spur the availability of Turkish translation, says the "unofficial blog" Google Operating System. Last September, when 11 languages were announced, many of the commenters requested Turkish, "so Google listened to the feedback." Turkish has an estimated 63 million speakers.

But popularity isn't everything. Maltese, with its 400,000 speakers, was among the 6 new languages introduced with Turkish this month. Can Armenian be far behind?

connect:
http://translate.google.com/