14 DAY TRIAL // Although this update could be seen as early as a few days ago, the Mountain View-based company officially introduced the new Google Translate languages today, along with several other improvements to the translation technology. The newly introduced languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish, raising the total number of supported languages to 23. This means that you can translate websites, texts and words from and to any language supported by the service.
As mentioned, along with more languages, Google has also came with a few other updates. "You can now translate text and web pages as well as perform cross-language searches between any two languages that we offer. For example, we now support Chinese translation to/from any of our languages (e.g., Chinese to French). So for those of you who will be following or attending the Olympics in Beijing this fall, you'll be able to more easily find and access content from local sources," Jeff Chin, Product Manager, wrote on the official Google blog.
Besides that, a "Detect language" function has been added to Google Translate that helps you detect the language of the website or text, and automatically translate it to the language you choose. "Keep in mind that the longer the text, the more accurate it will be. And for those of you who have embedded the Google Translate My Page gadget in your website to give it global reach, these new languages will automatically appear. Developers can also take advantage of these new languages in our AJAX language API," the Google official added.
Just like in the past, Google Translate also provides the "Suggest a better translation" link, which allows regular users to help the technology improve the quality of the translations and thus provide more accurate texts.