Official Web Master Blog

Google removed yet another advanced search tool: cross-language search. It was available in the "Search tools" menu as "translated foreign pages" and it allowed you to find pages written in other languages.


Google automatically suggested a few languages for your query, but you could manually add other languages. Your query was translated into all these languages, Google performed multiple searches for the translations, compiled a list of results and translated titles and snippets into your language.

Here's a screenshot from 2009, when Google Search added this feature:


"If you're traveling and want to find hotels, restaurants, activities or reviews written from a local perspective, or if you're just curious to find what's being written about a company, product or topic in another language, give Translated search in the Search Options panel a try," suggested Google at that time.

The feature was first available in 2007 as part of Google Translate, but the initial version supported a single destination language. "Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). If you're looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type 'wine tasting events in Bordeaux' into the search box on the 'Search results' tab on Google Translate. You'll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English," informed Google.

It's sad to see this feature disappear because it was very powerful and difficult to replace. It integrated Google Translate and Google Search, so Google performed multiple translations and searches just to shows you 10 cross-language search results.

Why was it removed? "The translate foreign pages feature is no longer offered. Removing features always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. You can still translate entire pages in Chrome. Streamlining enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people's lives," explained Google. Most likely, not many people used this feature.

I assume that most "search tools" features are rarely used and the same thing is true for other features for power users: advanced search, operators. They're not obvious, they're difficult to use and few people need them. As Google focuses more on answering questions, I expect to see fewer and fewer advanced search features and that's disappointing.

After the instant results for definitions and local time, Google's translation OneBox has a new card-style interface inspired by Google Now.

To trigger this OneBox, search for "translate", followed by the text you want to translate. For example: [translate mein luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller aale]. You could also add the destination language: [translate mein luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller aale into french].


You can also search for [word in language] or [word to language]. For example: [breakfast in Spanish], [estrella to English]. This also works for short phrases and expressions.


{ Thanks, Arpit. }

The Google Translate app for Android has some text files that include translation mistakes (/sdcard/Android/data/com.google.android.apps.translate/files/ol/v3r1/c_p). Some of them have been reported by users, blogs, news sites, while others are new. It's not clear why the application needs these lists since Google has fixed these translation errors.

Here are some examples:

German to English: Stuttgart -> London, tischen -> Nazi, Sheraton -> Hilton, StepStone -> Monster, Kilo -> pounds

French to English: le président américain -> Bush, toussaint -> Halloween, Homme -> Female ("homme" means "man" in French, "le président américain" means "the American president")


Spanish to English: Madrid -> London, útil -> helpful Google Translation, amor -> truelove ("útil" means "useful" in Spanish, while "amor" means "love").

English to Russian: jew -> жид (Yid, used as a derogatory epithet by antisemites), altogether -> обнаженная модель ("nude model" in Russian).

English to French: boobs massage -> Ségolène Royal, boobs massage -> Kaamelott Saison, it sucks -> elle suce

English to Spanish: quiz trivia -> vínculo con Israel

Catalan to English: Jordi Pujol -> Abraham Lincoln

English to Latin: English -> Latin, New York -> Romae, New York -> Londini, Milan -> Lib

English to Dutch: please -> iPhone, feet -> meter

Hungarian to English: magyar -> English, Kossuth Lajos -> Abraham Lincoln

Icelandic to English: Sigur Rós -> Foo Fighters, Sigur Ros -> Anastacia

Latin to English: Libri -> Random, Libri -> Reviews, Arma Virumque Cano -> Chairman Meow

Russian to English: Вконтакте -> Facebook, Вконтакте -> Twitter, Вконтакте -> OpenID ("Вконтакте"/VK is a popular Russian social network), ОС -> Windows ("ОС" means operating system in Russian), Уважаемый Дмитрий -> Mr President ("Уважаемый Дмитрий" means "Dear Dmitry", while Dmitry Medvedev was Russia's President), Владимир Владимирович -> Mr Prime Minister ("Владимир Владимирович" means "Vladimir Vladimirovich", while Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was Russia's Prime Minister), скрыто -> email ("скрыто" means "private, secret"), Сплин -> Metallica (popular Russian rock band).

Serbian to English: Mitar Mirić -> Rihanna, Miric -> Jackson

Swedish to English: Runkar -> Heil Hitler, kronor -> dollars

Google's machine translation algorithms are often fooled by proper nouns used in similar contexts (Madrid in Spanish vs London in English, Sigur Rós in Icelandic vs Foo Fighters in English), by measurement units and currencies (feet in English vs meter in Dutch), but there are also non-obvious mistakes.

Google Translate is useful, but you need an Internet connection to translate some text. Google's servers process your request, so language models are always up-to-date, you can translate long texts instantly and you don't need to download huge databases. Unfortunately, Google Translate is especially useful when you visit foreign countries and you may want to avoid the high data roaming fees.

Now you can use Google Translate offline if you have an Android device. Just install the latest version of the Google Translate for Android and you can download the core translation files for more than 50 languages. If you've already installed the application, you need to manually update it. The compressed language files have about 150MB (200MB after extracting the files from the archive) and are stored on your SD card if your Android device has one.

"You can select [Offline Languages] in the app menu to see all the offline language packages available for download. To enable offline translation between any two languages, you just need to select them in the offline languages menu. Once the packages are downloaded, you're good to go," informs Google.




The application works well offline, but you may need to wait a few seconds if you want to translate long texts. Offline translations are less accurate since Google lets you download some simplified language models.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of the offline and online translations of a French text from Le Monde:

Google Translate shows a new message at the bottom of the page: "Would you mind answering some questions to help improve translation quality?" It's not a boring survey, it's actually a great way to test your foreign language skills by picking the best translation.


Here's the link, just in case you can't find it. The URL parameters are only for English to French translations, but you can replace "fr" with "es", "de", "it" or other language code.

{ Thanks, Samuel and Camilo. }

As previously anticipated, Google Translate added a new feature called "phrasebook". It's just a fancy name for bookmarking translations and saving them to a list. You can display the "phrasebook" by clicking the "show phrasebook" button. The list of translations is searchable and can be grouped by language pair. The feature requires to sign in to Google Account so that Google can save the phrasebook.

"Phrasebook for Google Translate jumpstarts this slow learning process by allowing you to save the most useful phrases to you, for easy reference later on, exactly when you need them. By revisiting the useful phrases in your Phrasebook from time to time, you can turn any brief translation into lasting knowledge. It's easy to start using Phrasebook. Simply click the star under the translated text to save the translation in your Phrasebook," explains Google.



Unfortunately, this feature is not very useful to generate phrasebooks because Google Translate doesn't do a good job when it comes to translating short phrases. "You are welcome" is translated "Vous êtes les bienvenus" instead of "Je vous en prie", while "What is your name?" is translated "Quel est votre nom?" instead of the more common "Comment t'appelles-tu?" or "Comment vous appelez-vous?". Not to mention "Mon nom est" instead of "Je m'appelle". Maybe Google should have generated some phrasebooks with common phrases.

{ Thanks, Florian. }

Google Translate has some cool features that aren't yet publicly released. They're disabled, according to the source code of the page.

The text-to-speech feature will allow you to select the dialect for languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. It's nice to compare American English, British English and Australian English.


There's also a phrasebook feature that could help you learn some useful phrases and words in a variety of foreign languages. Another disabled feature is a dictionary view, but it's not clear if it only uses Google's dictionary data. Google could also monetize the service by including contextual ads.

Google Translate has a quick way to translate pages: just drag and drop links to the Google Translate page. You'll see a big yellow box at the bottom of the page when you're about to drop the link. Instead of copying the URL, pasting the URL and clicking "Translate", you can translate the page using a simple drag and drop.


This feature would be even more useful if you could drag and drop pages that are already loaded in a different tab. I've tried to do that in Firefox, Opera and Chrome, but it only worked well in Chrome. The other browsers added some new characters to the URL and Google had to translate error pages. Chrome is already integrated with Google Translate, so you don't have to use this feature.

You could also select some text from a page and drag it to the input box (ignore the yellow box this time). If instant translation is enabled, you don't even need to click "Translate".

Google Translate is great for translating long texts, but it's also useful for translating words and expressions. The main difference is that words can have multiple meanings and Google Translate will usually show more than one translation.

Now it's easier to select the right translation because Google shows if they're common and groups synonyms. Another improvement is that Google displays a list of reverse translations for each candidate, so you can pick the most appropriate word. "Reverse translations can distinguish translations of different meanings and reveal subtle differences among similar words. Each translation is now annotated with its most frequent reverse translations," explains Google.

For example, the French word "fort" has a lot meanings, so it's hard to pick between "loud", "strong", "heavy", especially if you don't know English. Google's reverse translations are helpful and it's nice to know that "strong" is the most common translation.


Unfortunately, the new features are only available if you're translating from English or into English.

Google Translate has a new button that shows word usage examples from the web. This works for both original text and the translated text, but it's no limited to single words: Google can also find examples for longer texts and even translate them for you.

"At Google we're always curious about new words from around the world, from all languages, and we think one of the best ways to understand and make sense of new words is by observing them in their natural habitat. Our latest feature does just that by providing you with example sentences taken from fresh new stories around the web," explains Google.


There's also a "select all" button that selects the entire translated text, so that it's easier to copy.


{ Thanks, Emanuele and Dean. }

Google Translate made it easier to translate a text into multiple languages by adding tabs. When you select a language from one of the two lists, it's added as a tab and you can quickly switch between the most recent three languages. Google's language detection works pretty well, so I'm not sure why there are tabs for the source languages, but the tabs for the target languages are useful.


You've probably noticed that Google Translate's custom drop-downs for selecting languages remember the most recent languages you've selected and highlight them.


In other Google Translate news, the Android app's conversation mode now supports 14 languages. "Earlier this year, we launched an update to Google Translate for Android with an experimental feature called Conversation Mode, which enables you to you translate speech back and forth between languages. We began with just English and Spanish, but today we're expanding to 14 languages, adding Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish," informs Google.

{ Thanks, Xavier. }