Google adds another language tool to its arsenal with the introduction of Google Dictionary. Google’s new dictionary offers up results in close to 30 languages, including the major Western European languages, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi. Notable exceptions from the line-up include Japanese and Persian (Farsi), though surely Google will work to support these languages at some point in the future.
Dictionary results in English show the main definition with pronunciation, synonyms, related phrases, and “web definitions” pulled from various sources throughout the Internet. Users can also star words for future reference. Google Dictionary features a minimalist design that makes it ideal for mobile devices and those with slow Internet connections. The absence of ads makes for a simple, distraction-free user experience.
Both monolingual and bilingual, bidirectional dictionaries are available. While the results provided by the English dictionary and the Spanish<>English dictionary were fairly comprehensive, the monolingual Spanish dictionary only returned a few sketchy web definitions. Many users would probably be better off sticking with an academic dictionary such as the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española for Spanish definitions.
Indeed, while Google’s new dictionary feature will be useful to some, it won’t be a solution that meets everyone’s needs. “Alex Zudin is the owner of Paragon Software, which works closely with Merriam-Webster, Oxford and other renowned keepers of language to build applications based on their data. Zudin says that Google could provide a service in the low-level consumer market, but higher-ed students and professionals would still buy the unabridged versions.” [1]
Google previously returned links to web definitions by entering “define:” plus a search term; however, Google Dictionary offers a more elegant solution with extra features. In addition, many users were unaware of this search trick, even though it existed for some time.
Google Dictionary is a natural complement to the company’s other language tools. The dictionary joins Google Translate, Google Translator Toolkit (which includes a basic translation memory (TM) tool and offers the ability to share glossaries), and a newly integrated search feature called Google Translated Search that makes it easier to search for results written in other languages.
[1]Los Angeles Times, Google quietly rolls out Dictionary
Thanks google translate makes perfect translation
Google definitely doesn’t make PERFECT translations.
Claude Piron, a long-time translator for the United Nations and the World Health Organization, wrote that machine translation, at its best, automates the easier part of a translator’s job; the harder and more time-consuming part usually involves doing extensive research to resolve ambiguities in the source text, which the grammatical and lexical exigencies of the target language require to be resolved:
Why does a translator need a whole workday to translate five pages, and not an hour or two? ….. About 90% of an average text corresponds to these simple conditions. But unfortunately, there’s the other 10%. It’s that part that requires six [more] hours of work. There are the ambiguities one has to resolve. For instance, the author of the source text, an Australian physician, cited the example of an epidemic which was declared during World War II in a “Japanese prisoner of war camp”. Was he talking about an American camp with Japanese prisoners or a Japanese camp with American prisoners? The English has two senses. It’s necessary therefore to do research, maybe to the extent of a phone call to Australia