Even though machine translation still couldn’t beat the accuracy of the bilingual-to-multilingual staff of professional translation firms or the per-word economy of translation service freelancers, the Google Transliteration IME remains a very important landmark in the translation field because of its unique and accessible functions. More to the point, this software is capable of converting foreign words typed using a Roman keyboard (i.e., type the word the way it sounds using Latin characters) into the original, native script.

Software Review

The Google Transliteration IME is no ordinary machine translation program that’s many levels less effective than a human translation. To be more precise, this beneficial application instantly offers users something that even the best professional translation agencies or freelance translation service experts couldn’t, and it’s a practically free-of-charge service to boot. What’s not to like about this handy program that offers immediate transliteration of Romanized terms? It’s easy to use, versatile, and it offers something that’s never been offered before in other machine translation software.

On the other hand, “machine translation” is a bit of a misnomer for this software’s capabilities, because its features aren’t the same as translation. Instead, it approximates the sound of the words typed into its prompt and then converts the syllables from one alphabet to another. It only converts the Romanized terms in another script without regard to their meaning. Its output is always in Unicode so that it can be seen on any platform or system. Additionally, the Google Transliteration IME enables the user to type over fourteen languages (and growing) using a regular, Latin alphabet keyboard on any program and with or without an online connection.

Features and Benefits

The Google Transliteration IME is freeware designed to accommodate multilingual communication through the transliteration of sound-alike and Romanized words into other scripts. The specialized transliteration tool was precision engineered in India at the Google conglomerate’s Bengaluru R&D Center in order to offer quick and easy conversion of Romanized foreign words into their native script equivalents.

The program provides all-inclusive features and benefits such as customization options, quick search, word completion, easy-to-use keyboard services, personalized choices, and offline support. It’s also compatible with all the latest Windows operating systems (from Windows XP to Windows 7). What’s more, it currently supports the following languages: Urdu, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Gujarati, Greek, Farsi (Persian), Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, Nepali, Marathi, Malayalam, and Arabic.

For translation of a word or phrase you can enter it online in a text box and have it translated instantly into any of the listed target languages. GT may directly translate the text into the target language in case of popular languages or go through English as an intermediary language in case of lesser known languages. The following is the list of languages that GT can handle as of now: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (both traditional and simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic. Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish.

Google has developed its own technique of translation through GT. The algorithms are based on statistical analysis instead of rule based analysis. The system depends on a solid corpus of equivalent words in the target and source language. This enormous data is sifted through using statistical models. Initially Google used UN documents to build the database. That is probably the reason why translation was made available between English, Chinese and Arabic, all official languages of UN in the beginning. Franz-Josef Och is the head of machine translation department of Google and is well known for building speed machine translation tools.

Google constantly updates the database through user feedback. Alternate translations particularly for technical terms are solicited from users for inclusion in future updates. Since GT does not apply grammatical rules, accuracy may be sacrificed in some cases for speed though it can help in a general understanding of the text. Also accuracy depends on the size of the database between the source and target languages. Languages in non Latin alphabet like Devanagiri and Arabic script are transliterated through phonetic equivalents in the Latin alphabet.

By adding the Google’s website translator into any webpage, instant access to translation of the webpage can be obtained. Google offers a translation bar that can be embedded in to any web page for translation in real time. Alternately using Google Toolbar, just moving the pointer over a word in English would display the equivalent word in the language of your choice. Client for GT is a free translator that can translate text in Windows application like MS Word, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Firefox etc. To sump up GT is one of the most popular free translation tools available for instant translation of web pages that can help in general understanding of the text.