Google Translate Now Teaches You How To Speak Like A Robot In 34 Languages

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular... → Learn More

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.

Product: Google Translate
Website: google.com
Company Google

Google Translate is a beta service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, or a webpage, into another language. The service limits the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, that will be translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language. For some languages, users are asked...

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