The Maltese cannot escape the global phenomenon that is Google. After launching a version of Google search in the Maltese language several years ago, Google has just introduced an English-Maltese/Maltese-English translation service in its Google Translate.
Maltese was added a few days ago together with Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian and Galician.
"The rollout of these seven additional languages marks a new milestone: automatic translations between 41 languages (1,640 language pairs!). This means we can now translate between languages read by 98 per cent of internet users," said Google's product manager Jeff Chin while making the announcement on the official Google blog.
He claimed that Google Translate is the first freely available machine translation system for several languages.
"Of course, there's always room for improvement, and we're working hard to improve translation quality.
"Our statistical models are built from vast quantities of monolingual and translated texts using automated machine learning techniques."
i-Tech tried it out with mixed results. It could translate simple words such as book and car very easily. However, it faltered when prompted to translate thunder into Maltese or karrozzin into English, proof that this service is for simple and light use.
Google Translate is not the first English-Maltese dictionary service online, as the first Maltese website, created by migrant Grazio Falzon 14 years ago, published a list of translated words.
Then there is www.maltadictionary.com, which has been around for a few years offering English-Maltese translations and recently was also made available for mobile phones.
http://www.google.com/translate
Maltese was added a few days ago together with Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian and Galician.
"The rollout of these seven additional languages marks a new milestone: automatic translations between 41 languages (1,640 language pairs!). This means we can now translate between languages read by 98 per cent of internet users," said Google's product manager Jeff Chin while making the announcement on the official Google blog.
He claimed that Google Translate is the first freely available machine translation system for several languages.
"Of course, there's always room for improvement, and we're working hard to improve translation quality.
"Our statistical models are built from vast quantities of monolingual and translated texts using automated machine learning techniques."
i-Tech tried it out with mixed results. It could translate simple words such as book and car very easily. However, it faltered when prompted to translate thunder into Maltese or karrozzin into English, proof that this service is for simple and light use.
Google Translate is not the first English-Maltese dictionary service online, as the first Maltese website, created by migrant Grazio Falzon 14 years ago, published a list of translated words.
Then there is www.maltadictionary.com, which has been around for a few years offering English-Maltese translations and recently was also made available for mobile phones.
http://www.google.com/translate