Adil Najam
Google Labs has added five new languages to its Google Translate service, including Urdu. I first learnt of the news on ProPakistani yesterday and soon afterward one of our readers, Watan Aziz, left a comment on ATP with a demonstration of the new Urdu Translation tool.
I had already tried out the tool, had my chuckle, and planned this post. Here is how: The current post at ATP at that time was Owais Mughal’s post on the (then) forthcoming T20 Cricket Semi-Final, so I just copied the ‘above the fold’ part of that post and inserted it into Google Translation Urdu. Here is what I got:
The first line that came out of Google Urdu Translate was: “Hum Daikhain Gay.”
Long-time readers of this blog will recognize immediately why I chuckled: The line “Hum Daikhain Gay” is amongst my all-time favorite lines in the Urdu language. Owais Mughal probably did not have that line in mind when he wrote his T20 Cricket post and Google Urdu Translator probably does not care about the significance of the line to Faiz-lovers either. But by virtue of that being the first line I saw on Google Urdu Translator, at least I was off to a positive impression, despite some of the other elements of what came up.
Give Google Urdu Translate a try yourself, and tell us what you think. This now brings the number of languages supported by Google Translate to 57.
P.S. Interestingly, the first non-Latin script domain name, in Arabic script, also just came live: (http://????.?????-?????????.???/). It browsers that cannot handle Arabic script this appears as: http://xn--4gbrim.xn—-ymcbaaajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ar/default.aspx. Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology’s official website (http://www.mcit.gov.eg) via its domain name in Arabic (http://????.?????-?????????.???/) became the first site to gain this distinction and, reportedly, by 2011 domain names will also be available in Urdu.
I actually chuckled reading about how Google Translate spit out Hum Daikhain Gay for that cricket match update. It’s fascinating to see how quickly language tech is expanding, especially with those new Urdu domain names hitting the web. I usually spend my days managing Sophia Watson, an entertainment site where parents can playfully predict baby genders using traditional Chinese and Mayan methods based on birth and conception dates, but I personally love diving into linguistics and tech trends in my free time. Would love to know if the latest version handles poetic translations better!
The translation of Owais Mughal’s cricket post into Hum Daikhain Gay was a hilarious touch that really highlighted the quirks of the new Urdu feature. I often explore similar tech and language experiments on my blog, Sprinki Sbrunga, so this update caught my eye immediately.
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