Google translate has been available for a while. However, I read an article from CNET news about its new feature: Google Translate now helps with pronunciation. I went to the web page right away and tested it out. It is very cool!
In Chinese, the second character of bike and the first character of bank are the same but with different sounds. Google translate did good job to make them correct in its corresponding romanization! This tool is much better than my javascript tool I posted in my blog last year.
This web tool does better job to translate English to Chinese than the opposite way: Chinese to English. Here is one example, I put my bike parked outside the door of the bank as a result of Chinese:
I think that the tool actually doing the translation based on Chinese grammar pattern literately, in the order of piece by piece like dominoes in a line . In this sense, it is a great tool for English speaking people to understand or learn Chinese. You just copy and paste a Chinese sentence there to let Goole translate to analyze it.
By the way, if you let the tool to translate English to either Simplified or Traditional Chinese, the romanization results are the same, all in Pinyin.
This a TED talk, Joachim de Posada says, Don't eat the marshmallow yet.
enable subtitles and select Chinese(Simplified)
This is my first translation work as a TED volunteer translator. TED Translation project was launched about a year ago. It has been very successful. With people involved world wide, so many talks have been translated to various languages with high quality. I read an article from TED saying that it was impossible just for TED hired translators to do the job and actually volunteers having done very high quality translation work.
I had been kept watching TED shows almost on daily base during my initial period knowing TED. When I saw this one, I immediately decided to join the translation project to do this talk. It took very quick time to get my translator application approval passed. Then I took about one week to finish this talk. Fortunately, when I was doing the translation, the traditional Chinese just finished the initial translation and was in review stage, I used the version as my reference. That's really helpful since both Simplified and Traditional Chinese are very close.
The review time took quite a while. It took about more than one week to have a reviewer assigned by TED. I think the reviewer is a Chinese from Mainland China. He is very polite and respect to my work. I took some of his revisions, but missed some. Then he marked it as completed by mistake,may miscommunication during our emails. Soon we realized the editor comments in TED. I make a request to pull it back. We took less than one day do to complete it, removed all the editor notes. Finally, the Simplified Chinese subtitle is available on TED. It has been very enjoyable work on web!
Now I just finished another talk and it is in the stage waiting for reviewer. Hopefully it will be available soon.
By the way, when I did my first translation, there were only 7 talks with Simplified Chinese subtitles. Now the number reaches to 34!
During my translation, I also found out that there are quite a few of Chinese web site related to TED, One is YeeYan, which is a web site with a lot Chinese translations from variety of languages. There is one active group about TED talks. I posted my translation there to share TED with people there. Another one is TEDToChina. This site was initialized by a group of Chinese university students in GuangDong Province and it has far more Chinese translations in article format there. Recently they hosted a similar talk conference in GuangZhou with great success. From both sites, I contact a key organizer. His name soon appears on TED translation project.
I had my vacation in China from the last Boxing Day to the Jan 14, 2009. On 13th(Tuesday) I took one day tour in Beijing with my video camcorder. That was a very exiting and eye-opening day.
From the early morning, I had my breakfast in a very nice and clean restaurant with variety of typical Beijing breakfast food, which you can only find out in Beijing. I had a lots of food and enjoyed them very much.
Compared to the food I had about 30 years ago when I was a student in Beijing, even though the price has been increased from less than one to ten yuan for a meal, the environment and food quality are much better. Still that breakfast costs me only about two US bucks! Here is the first post I shot to my YouTube account:
There are many other videos. I shared them to my friends one day after I came back to Calgary and they got very exited seeing these amazing people and scenes. I am going to post them in series late on.
Notes: Right click on above links to save mp3 file to your local computer.
The mp3 clip files are in my dropbox public shared area. There is a limit to put files there and I may delete them. The service may not be available as well. Therefore, you may not be able to open them if either case is true.
Back from China for a week. Today is Chinese New Year. By chance, I found this video piece from YouTube.com about foot massage as a way to heal physical problems:
