Lesson 4.5: Translation and search

Contents:

Google translation

Google has spent a lot of time building automatic translation systems and the ability to search in other languages. This lesson will look at how to access two translation tools.

In the last lesson you explored a bit in the left-hand panel.

Say, you want to explore what is being written about current events involving the [eurozone].

Figure: Search results for [eurozone].

Click the Advanced Search UI menu item (hidden in the gear icon, upper left of the search page), scroll down, and click on the pop-up menu item labeled “Narrow your results by….” This option lets you narrow your search to results in your selected language, and then you can use Google translate to see that page in YOUR language.

Figure: The Advanced Search UI which lets you narrow your search results.

To filter the search results to a particular language, just click on the “Any language” button and select a language, here I’m selecting Greek:

You could also just search for [google translate] and the very first result is for Google Translate.

Figure: Using Google search to find [Google Translate].

Using Google Translate, you can translate the question "Where is the Shangri La hotel?" from English into Chinese:

Figure: Results for an English to Chinese translation of “Where is the Shangri La hotel?”

This sentence is automatically translated from English into Simplified Chinese.

You can change that into Spanish by clicking.

Figure: Results for an English to Spanish translation of “Where is the Shangri La?”

You can use the language selector to choose many different languages.

Figure: Click on the “To Spanish” button in Google Translate to get a drop-down of possible languages.

This capability to switch languages gives you the ability to see the world through the eyes of somebody else, in their culture, in their language, the way they write it.

Try the next exercise to see if you can translate and understand the rest of the world.