Dear Josh, What an amazing feature!
I am an American software trainer who has worked in Chennai and Cochin [where I was in a building in a campus called Technopolis that Google was supposedly considering for their Indian headquarters earlier in their career. Reportedly the owner said, "I don't want another software company in my building. One week they're here, the next week they're gone." Google went to Bangalore instead. I don't know if the story is apocryphal or not, it certainly is cautionary]. I also spent a fair amount of time in Andhra Pradesh. I am the part-time amanuensis for Bhau Kalchuri, one of the last living disciples of the silent master, Meher Baba, whose followers are not very numerous and scattered throughout the world. A lot of the people receive their information through the website, JaiBaba.com, and the Google translation feature is a fantastic addition to it. This following might very well be high on your radar, in which case, please disregard. Either way, no reply is necessary. You might want to make a major area of focus the South Indian languages, particularly Telegu and Tamil and secondarily Malayalam and Kannada. People that read Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, etc. can probably read the Hindi translations just fine. The downside is that these languages are crushingly difficult. As much time as I've spent in Andhra, I still don't speak a word of Telegu. It all sounds like porpoise bubbles to me. Comparative texts are also probably few. The upside is that there is a huge number of very bright bi-lingual IT and techno guys who could support these languages. Anyway, look forward to the day when we can add these languages to those that are already supported. Congratulations on an invaluable program and wish you much success in your part to bring all the peoples of the world closer together. Lynwood Shiva Sawyer ******* On Feb 10, 12:06 pm, Josh (Google Employee) wrote: > Hi everyone, > > Just about every day we hear from a user, or potential user, asking us > when or if we'll support translations to/from language X. While we're > quite proud that we already support 52 of the worlds languages, there > are still many more languages that we would love to enable for our > users. > > We're constantly working hard to bring new languages up to our quality > standards so that we can make them available to our users, but > unfortunately launching a new language is hard. Every language that we > support requires very large amounts of training data and significant > amounts of engineering work to make available to you, our users. > > So if we don't support your language yet, rest assured, we're working > on it. The limiting factor is almost always training data. What we > need is large amounts of parallel data, that is, large amounts of > documents or sentences that have already been translated between the > new language and one of our supported languages. > > The best way you can help is by contributing Translation Memories > (TMs) or glossaries by uploading them to Google Translator Toolkit > (http://translate.google.com/toolkit). For details on how to > contribute, see the following: > > Uploading a Translation Memory: > > http://translate.google.com/support/toolkit/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe... > > Uploading a Glossary: > > http://translate.google.com/support/toolkit/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe... > > If you don't have existing TMs or glossaries to upload, but are > multilingual and still want to help, you can contribute by using the > Translator Toolkit to translate documents into or from the new > language you hope we'll support and allowing us to use the data you > create to train our systems. > > Many thanks everyone. > > Cheers, > Josh > Senior Software Engineer > Google Translate -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-translate-general?hl=en.
