Good news - Google Translate is now available for Lao

[Luan Vannithone]

Hi All,
 
Below fyi ... in some way our effort must have contributed to this, albeit small. Note the translation quality is still low.
It can only improve from here if more of us use GTT for translation.
 
Cheers, Luang Vannithone
https://sites.google.com/site/eng2lao/z2home
 
------ News text ------------------------------

http://translate.google.com/

*Google Adds Its 65th Language To Google Translate With Lao*

WebProNews.com, 13 Sep 2012 http://translate.google.com/

Google announced today that it has added Lao to its Google Translate
repertoire, making it the 65th language the service supports.

Lao, sometimes called Loation, is spoken in Laos, Thailand, the U.S.,
France, Canada, China, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina. In Laos, it
is the official language. As of 2006, there were a reported 5.22
million native speakers.

Google is keeping the “alpha” tag on Lao for the time being, as it’s
not quite where the company wants it to be. Google Translate Associate
Product Manager Minqi Jiang says in a post on the Google Translate
blog:

The Google Translate team is constantly working to improve automatic
translations, both for languages that have been available for some
time, and for currently unavailable languages whose translation
quality have yet to meet our launch standards. This work includes
collecting new data from which our system can learn and grow smarter;
changing the algorithms behind Google Translate; and improving the
grammaticality of translations. There are many languages we work on
that are not there yet but that we hope to launch in the future.

Support for Lao meets our launch standards, but translation quality is
at the lower end compared to that of other languages we offer. We
therefore designate Lao with an “alpha” status until we can make
further improvements. While our Lao translations will be usable in
some situations, like providing an English reader with the gist of an
article written in Lao, they will fail in other situations where more
precise translations are needed. We need your feedback in order to
improve the quality of Lao translations.

Google is calling upon users to help improve its translation of the
language by providing alternate translations (by clicking on words or
phrases of the translated sentence) or using the Google Translator
Toolkit to upload translations.

Last month, Google added some new camera functionality to Google
Translate for Android, making the service all the more helpful in
travel situations. Now, you can take a picture of a sign that is
written in an unfamiliar language, and get it translated.
--------------------- end of News text -------------------------------------

 

[Elizabeth Rajphackdy]

Sabaidii everyone,

This is such a good news!!!!  

For the time being, using the Google Translator Toolkit  will be an important step towards consolidation of  Lao language's presence in the internet. GREAT!!

Best regards

Elizabeth_

---

From: luan_va...@hotmail.com
To: laol10n...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [LaoEnGT] Good news - Google Translate is now available for Lao
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2012 15:13:28 +1000