Google Translate now supports Bangla: Be a Contributor!

Yes, you read it right! Google Translate is supporting Bangla. Although it is in alpha phase, it is certainly a great initiative by Google. Being the sweetest and sixth most spoken language in all over the world, Bangla should have drawn the attention of Google Translate team much earlier. Well … better late than never … at least they’ve started it now!

I don’t know exactly when did they started the project, but Google Translate team announced it on June 21 and I’ve found it just a couple of hours ago! Then I gave it a try. It did not go for a smooth ride (it is in alpha state remember?), but I am glad that at least it works! Below is the screen shot from the Google Translate. As I said before, the translation is not perfect that much. So most of the translated portion is not accurate.

Pretty amazing, huh! At least we can see our own letters and words in Google Translate. But it is not the end, it is just the beginning. It is like an infant who needs proper ‘education’ and ‘guidance’ to become a powerful online translator.

As it is in alpha state, it needs all of our help to become stronger. As you can see from the above screen shots, there are lots of words which Google Translate can’t properly translate yet. Also there are lots of grammatical mismatch. If you think you’re worthy to help Google Translate for making a powerful online Bangla translator, then please try to help Google. Do not know how to help? Well… you can start with Google Translate Group. You can post the errors, so that they can be fixed. Apart from this, you can also fix some words for proper translation by yourself. To fix a word, choose the word you wish to fix from translated part on the right side and place your cursor over that word. The word will be highlighted with a yellow mark. Then click the word, you’ll be prompted with a text field to input the corrected/fixed word. Write the corrected/fixed word there and press the Enter key. You’re done! Very easy, right! A pictorial tutorial of this correction can be found here.

Just imagine, some day in future, we can translate any article in to our sweet language from any languages of the world! Isn’t it wonderful? So why are you waiting then? Fasten your seatbelt and dive to improve the Bangla Translator and become a contributor. Bangla is our own language, no one will take care of it unless we do it by ourselves.

Update: June 23 – 0115 hrs

Just received a post in Facebook from a user group, named Google translation in Bangla, about “How to contribute in Google Bangla Translation Service”. The whole post is excerpted  below in its original form.

Every language that Google support requires very large amounts of training data and significant amounts of engineering work to make available to users. So what Google need is large amounts of parallel data, that is, large amounts of documents or sentences that have already been translated between the new language and one of google supported languages.

The best way you can help is by contributing Translation Memories (TMs) or glossaries by uploading them to Google Translator Toolkit. Using Google Translator Toolkit. For details on how to contribute, see the following: Uploading a Translation Memory, Uploading a Glossary.

How can you contribute to improve Translation quality?

If you encounter a translation that doesn’t seem right, quite often Google Translate will have alternative results available. To view these, simply click the phrase in question. When you click a better alternative translation, Google Translate will learn from your feedback and continue to improve over time. When you are done with a bangla translation you may face two problems. (1) not correct meaning (2) sentence structure problem. You can solve these problems. (1) You can click for alternate translation and input this alternate. Google translate will learn automatically from your input. (2) Hold shift key, then just select the word and ‘drag and drop’ to rearrange sentence structure. Google translate will learn automatically from your new structure.

Let’s put hand together to improve google bangla translation service.

Update: June 23 – 2027 hrs

A really helpful and motivated article about the Bangla Google Translate has been posted by Jamal Uddin Khan. The article was written in Bangla. The article also has a pictorial tutorial on how to help Google Translate team to enrich Bangla.