Web Tool: Google Translate

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!

For example, I tried to type in a sentence of "Today I rode my bike a bank in downtown":



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.