In 1887 Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof for his book Unia Libro he crafted a language called Esperanto. It was designed to be an easy to learn language that would help folks from all over the world understand each other. 125 years later, has hundreds of thousands of active users, some few hundred of which learned it from birth via their parents.
Seeing as how Google Translate shares similar goals, the Mountain View firm felt Zamenhof's homemade tongue would be the perfect fit for its machine translation service. Google has today announced that it is adding this artificial language to its Google Translate product.
Google implies that addition of the language a largely symbolic measure, designed to emphasize the fact that both Google Translate and the Esperanto language were created to further the goal of helping people understand one another. Google says that the team was actually stunned by how well the machine engine handled the language.
For Esperanto, the number of existing translations is comparatively small. German or Spanish, for example, have more than 100 times the data; other languages on which we focus our research efforts have similar amounts of data as Esperanto but don’t achieve comparable quality yet.
Google attributes the ease of translation of the language to the fact that it was constructed in a way that was easy for humans to learn and therefore is easy for machines to translate. You can try out the new language on the Google Translate site now.
Sure, it may not be the most useful addition Google Translate's ever seen, but hey, it gets us one step closer to watching cult classics like Incubus without the subtitles. What's that, you haven't heard of William Shatner's pre-Star Trek, all Esperanto romp? Crack open your machine translator and watch the video.
2 comments:
Esperanto is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year. What a good way to celebrate.
Dankon, Google!
Good to see that Google Translate has finally added Esperanto:)
The new online course http://www.lernu.net has 125 000 hits per day and Esperanto Wikipedia enjoys 400 000 hits per day. That can't be bad :)
Post a Comment