Google’s new input tools greatly expand the set of available input methods for many languages.
Every language has its own set of popular input methods, each familiar to its own subset of users. For example, the Portuguese keyboard has two common layouts, one popular in Brazil and another in Portugal. In addition, given the popularity of Latin-alphabet keyboards, a transliteration input tool is often the preferred input method for many languages, allowing users to convert Latin-alphabet input into the proper written script. (Chinese has over 80,000 characters. Try fitting them all on a keyboard.) With the right transliteration input tools turned on, you can simply type “privet” to input привет, “tieng chao” for tiếng chào, and “nihao” for 你好. More.
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Indonesia
Local time: 22:24
English to Indonesian
+ ...
Like it or not, Google Translate helps many people around the world in finding translations of words. Therefore, if it has new input tools, it will help many more people, although more translators will possibly regard it a threat, too.
Netherlands
Local time: 17:24
German to Dutch
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I don´t think one should rely on Google Translate. Every user can give input...wrong input as well!
Indonesia
Local time: 22:24
English to Indonesian
+ ...
I admit that GT is not reliable, but it sometimes helps. You should check the translations it provides.
[Edited at 2013-02-10 14:43 GMT]
Local time: 18:24
English to Finnish
Google Translator is not a threat to any professional translator. People use it more like an online dictionary than a translation service. I actually don't even consider it a reliable dictionary.
[Edited at 2013-02-10 16:18 GMT]
Spain
Local time: 17:24
Spanish to English
+ ...
Google Translator is not a threat to any professional translator. People use it more like an online dictionary than a translation service. I actually don't even consider it a reliable dictionary.
[Edited at 2013-02-10 16:18 GMT]
I agree. Nevertheless, the tool sounds interesting, as it seems will be quicker to write things in Russian cyrillic without changing keyboards and it will be handy for Chinese and similar languages too.
[Edited at 2013-02-10 18:34 GMT]
Local time: 23:24
Chinese to English
+ ...
No, I do not even consider Google translator a translator. Presently, it is turning out crap. Maybe in the future it will be improved but for now, if you use it for your translation jobs, there will be much to grieve and woe betide the translator.
I pasted Chinese stuff into it and make it translate into English. So far, it is crappy although you can still glean some ideas about the Chinese stuff and I must warn that sometimes even these ideas are wrong because the translation is misleading or even wrong.
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:24
English to Japanese
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No, I do not even consider Google translator a translator. Presently, it is turning out crap. Maybe in the future it will be improved but for now, if you use it for your translation jobs, there will be much to grieve and woe betide the translator.
I don't think anyone is advocating/adopting Google Translate for professional translation jobs. Warning/criticising people of doing so (as it happens so often here that it's now turned into a cliché) when no one actually seems to be doing it is something of a red herring. The warning is appropriate for someone who is using GT to get a Sanskrit translation of their favourite proverb so that they can have it tattooed. In that case the mistake is for life!
For personal use, I think GT has many advantages. It has allowed me to get a gist of what my Brazilian friend was saying on Facebook; on another occasion it allowed me to order an academic book published in Poland from a Polish bookshop. On both occasions, I would not have bothered had it not been for GT.
Canada
Local time: 11:24
Chinese to English
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Since the article really talks only about input methods, whether Google Translate is reliable or not isn’t really relevant.
That said, I just checked it out and if I tried to input Chinese, I am offered four input methods (or just two, depending on how you count):
1. three varieties of pinyin, and
2. Wubi
That means people who don’t speak Mandarin and have never had any training in Wubi (which is btw usable only for simplified Chinese) is still left in the cold.
From an accessibility point of view, this really isn’t doing much. In my city’s public libraries, computers are already pre-installed with the pinyin IME, but only the pinyin IME, so people who can’t type pinyin can’t type Chinese there. With Google Translate’s new functionality people who don’t know pinyin (and who aren’t professional typists and/or who don’t write in simplified Chinese) still can’t type Chinese. What Google has done hasn’t improved the situation a single bit.
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