Thursday, May 1, 2008

Multilingual search

I've been playin around a bit with the Google AJAX Search API and the Google AJAX Language API. It may come handy when translating something.
But not from or to Hungarian, as it is not included in Google's translation tools, though Romanian, Polish, Czech, Croatian and Bulgarian languages has been recently added to the supported ones. Either
there's no need for Hungarian translation or Hungarians hadn't got lobbists at Google. Must be the former one. It may be either because Hungarians speak all other languages or because they only read original Hungarian web pages.
Here's Google's version. It not only translates the query terms to a second language but also tranlates the search results back to the original language. So it's seemingly targeted to those guys, who speak only one language. As Google search guru Udi Manber puts it:
"if you’re a user in Egypt, for example, and you only speak Arabic, you can write the query in Arabic, ask to translate it into English. When you then click on the results, it will translate the Web pages to Arabic for you—all of it done by Google translation. That opens the whole world to everybody." (source)

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