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Posts Tagged ‘Translate Languages’

Latest Version of Google Chrome Adds Auto-Translation and New Privacy Features

Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome, the company’s increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome.

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Read 52 Languages

Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind Google Translate to automatically detect and translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off for those languages you don’t need it for.

One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser, while the translation itself happens on Google’s servers. As with all automatic translation algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post.

Better Privacy Controls

In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a number of new privacy controls. Through the new “Content Settings” option, Chrome users on Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these relatively complicated controls.

What About the Mac and Linux?

With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of Chrome isn’t easy. While these new features aren’t available for Mac and Linux users yet, it’s likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time being, Mac users on the dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which finally brings a usable bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome.

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YouTube Videos Get Automatic Captions

Google just announced that YouTube can now automatically generate captions and subtitles for videos in English. For now, this feature is only enabled on a handful of partner channels, but Google plans to make this feature available for all users in the future.

In the meantime, YouTube now also offers a new ‘automatic caption timing’ feature for all new uploads that makes it easier to add captions manually. You simply upload a text file with a transcript of the video and Google’s speech recognition technology will figure out when those words are spoken and create captions based on this information.

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As Google points out, YouTube’s users currently upload over 20 hours of video every minute – and most of this video isn’t accessible for users with hearing impairments. While uploaders could always add captions to their videos manually, only a very small minority of users ever did so.

YouTube’s speech recognition technology is based on the same speech-to-text algorithms that transcribe voicemails in Google Voice. You can also translate these captions into 51 languages.

As expected, these captions aren’t always perfect, but work surprisingly well on the videos that we have seen so far.

If you want to have a look at how these captions work, have a look at one of the videos in the UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and Google & YouTube channels.

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