Last Tuesday, Google introduced a translation service to its cloud-based word processing software, Documents. I abandoned the Microsoft Word ship a long time ago—I think my last release was Word 2002 — and use Documents for all my text entry. So this additional feature is a neat novelty that just makes my move from MS even sweeter.
Google has been offering the ability to translate Web pages into 53 different languages for some time. So I’m assuming some Google engineer finally got around to adding the right Web service hook into their office software.
Language translation has been a long standing problem for computer science, and Google has not solved this by any means. There are still complexities with idiomatic expressions, verb moods ( subjunctive), modal verbs, etc. that won’t be untangled with a series of rules coded in software.
So for kicks, I cut and pasted a small section of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables into my Document and then let Google have at it. Conclusion: Star Trek’s Universal Translator has not yet been reached, but Google Translate does a good job of making everything sound like Borat.
Results after the jump.Continue reading