IVR

Yesterday, on the Google (News - Alert) Translate blog, the company announced several changes to its Google Translate service. The service, which allows you to translate text, Web pages and e-mails, lets users search Google across a variety of languages, translate incoming e-mail messages and essentially take the translation service with them on their smart phones. The newly revamped page has been altered to be more user-friendly and ergonomic. The Translate page also adds additional tips and tutorials for better use of the services.

"We’re currently rolling out several changes globally to our look and feel that should make translating text, Web pages and documents on Google Translate even easier. These changes will be available globally within a couple of days," said Awaneesh Verma, product manager at Google Translate.

The service allows users to translate to and from about 57 languages (Yahoo!’s (News - Alert) Babel Fish allows for only about a dozen), including not only the languages you’d expect, but surprising ones like Welsh, Basque, Maltese and Malay. Another point Google has over Babel Fish is the fact that you can “listen” to the word, phrase, e-mail or Web page via a digital voice, helping you (somewhat) with tips on pronunciation for some of the languages. I ran through some languages with which I’m familiar; namely French and Hungarian, and while the voice gets the pronunciation somewhat in the ballpark, it sometimes leaves a lot to be desired, particularly when it comes to putting the accent on the correct syllables. Still, if you desperately need to find out how to ask where the bus station is in Albanian, the pronunciation tool will set you on the right path and help you avoid totally mangling the words in the guide book. For languages that use different alphabets, written “Romanization,” or a phonetic pronunciation guide, is available.

The Web page translation feature is also very handy: it allowed me to read today’s headlines on Der Spiegel, a major German language newspaper (I never got past the “Good morning, Hans. Is this your book?” stage in high school German.) Though Google Translate is truly a next-generation machine translation tool that exceeds the quality of previous translation engines, as always, it handles slang awkwardly (which is understandable). While the main stories, written in formal language, are quite comprehensible and largely free of the weird phrasing in the translated version that was a feature of previous machine translation engines, even Google isn’t up to the task of keeping the more informally worded reader comments from sounding rather silly. Still, you can generally get the gist of the comments, and get a good laugh besides at the awkward language.

But you’ll be disappointed if you’re there to read the ads: the website translation feature does not translate ads or pop-ups.