Google Launches Bulgarian-Latin Translation Service



Google has added Latin to its automatic translation service, allowing Bulgarians to translate for the first time into the dead language.

"
We are excited to announce our first translation system for a language with no native speakers at all,"
the Web search and advertising company said in a statement.

Google said the service ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) would be useful for the more than 100,000 American students who take the National Latin Exam every year, as well as to many more Latin language learners and scholars worldwide.

"
As with every language, machine translating to and from Latin is a difficult problem and we know that our grasp of the ablative absolute or use of the subjunctive may occasionally be off,"
it said.

"
However, unlike any of the other languages Google Translate supports, Latin offers a unique advantage: most of the text that will ever be written in Latin has already been written, and a comparatively large part of it has been translated into other languages."


The languages that Google Translate supports include minority languages such as Welsh and Haitian Creole, and the addition of Latin is sure to please scholars and traditionalists.

In a blog post, written entirely in Latin, Jakob Uszkoreit, a senior engineer at Google, said that Latin was far from a "
dead language"
.

"
There are many Latin language learners,"
he wrote. "
Over 100,000 American students take the National Latin Exam every year and many more learn Latin all of the world. And there is a wealth of information originally written in it."


He said that while Google recognized that the Latin translation tool would rarely be used to decipher emails or captions on YouTube videos, it would enable web users to read many of the crucially important philosophical and scientific texts originally written in this language.

"
There are tens of thousands of scanned books written in Latin on Google Books, and many more contain Latin quotes and proverbs,"
he wrote.

Google expects translations to and from Latin to be among the most accurate offered by its Google Translate tool.

"
Unlike any of the other languages Google Translate supports, Latin offers a unique advantage: most of the text that will ever be written in Latin has already been written, and a comparatively large part of it has been translated in to other languages.

"
We use these translations, found in books and on the web, to train our system."

Blyme I have noticed on google there is a Read phonetically too

Oddy

:LMHO:omg hahahaha...never use google translate 80% of the time it is wrong