Google Translate doesn’t always get every translation right, but it is useful enough to get the gist of a Webpage or even a menu written in a foreign language. It’s machine translation, so what do you expect? But now Google will even teach you to talk like a machine with a voice synthesizer button that reads out translations for 34 languages.
Some of the languages, such as English or French, are smoother than others, But when you click on the text-to-speech icon to translate a sentence to Chinese or Dutch, it sounds like a robot. And so will you if you mimic it exactly. But don’t complain, now you can get free language lessons simply by typing sentences into Google Translate.
The smoother text-to-speech synthesizers are for the following languages: English, Haitian Creole, French, Italian, German, Hindi and Spanish. Google licensed technology from eSpeak for the rest, which is more robotic, but covers many more languages.
The eSpeak languages are: Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.
