Urdu Goes High Tech: Google Translation for Urdu Language

Posted on May 14, 2010
Filed Under >Adil Najam, Poetry, Science and Technology, Urdu
800 Comments
Total Views: 100800

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--wgb h1c/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.

800 responses to “Urdu Goes High Tech: Google Translation for Urdu Language”

  1. Hurrah, that’s what I was looking for, what
    a material! present here at this weblog, thanks admin of this site.

  2. Hi there, I desire to subscribe for this weblog to obtain hottest updates, so where can i do
    it please assist.

  3. Thanks for one’s marvelous posting! I seriously enjoyed reading
    it, you happen to be a great author. I will always bookmark your blog and will come back in the future.
    I want to encourage you continue your great posts,
    have a nice evening!

  4. I visit day-to-day a few web sites and information sites to read
    articles or reviews, except this web site gives feature based articles.

  5. I was curious if you ever considered changing the page layout
    of your site? Its very well written; I love what youve
    got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of
    content so people could connect with it better.
    Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or two pictures.
    Maybe you could space it out better?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*