Google Translate can now detect the language of the source text pasted by the user. This service is rapidly growing into a solid option for fast , casual translations where the user needs to grasp the general meaning of a foreign-language text. In general, the translations seem to be better than the ones offered by other machine translation programs and services.
Here are some highlights about the service:
- 22 languages with bi-directional translation in all combinations, for a total of 506 language pairs
- Auto-detection of the pasted source text (first option in the source language drop-down button)
- Google Translate’s APIs allow developers to connect their applications to the service. It will be interesting to see which one of the many TEnT providers first comes up with a good implementation of this service. For instance, when a sentence has no matches in a translation memory, the TEnT could quickly query Google Translation and offer a draft automated translation that the human translator can adapt and proofread